Recently, I've been building an end-to-end invoice review app. Not the most glamorous sentence I've ever written, I know. Stick with me, because it turned into one of the more interesting lessons I've had about where AI belongs in a system and, more importantly, where it doesn't.
Last time on Obi the Explorer, the agent got a critic. One LLM wrote the recommendation, a second one judged it, and nothing went out until it passed. I closed by wondering how much of a good host is really just knowing what's going on in the room, and whether an agent can ever know that from the outside.
This week, we find out. This is the last iteration, so I'll land it properly.
If you've worked front-of-house, you'll know there's never just one door. The phone rings while an email comes in, someone's waiting at the desk, and there's a message sitting in the Instagram inbox from last night. Assuming your place is trendy like that.
Meanwhile, the kitchen is telling you it's slammed, and you're quoting wait times based on whatever you last heard (Yeah, it gets chaotic, but it's rewarding at the end of the day). So you will notice that in the same restaurant there are four different conversations, and the customer gets a different experience depending on which one they pick.
Last time on Obi the Explorer, the agent made contact with the outside world. It started telling the kitchen what to do, and I spent most of the previous post explaining why it should check the fridge first. I closed on a question I couldn't quite answer. If the agent learns to check its own work, who checks the checker?
This week, we find out. Kind of.
So last week, I shouted out my anniversary. It was great. Had a lovely dinner and went to a magician's bar afterwards for drinks. As in, while you're at your table, a magician comes and does a whole bunch of tricks. Like your own private show. Try new things, but know enough about the person you're with to decide which risks to take. Alright, that's all for now.
Last time on Obi the Explorer, the agent learned. It remembered regulars, kept track of what they liked, and wrote it all down once each conversation was over. I closed on Ava from Ex Machina, and the idea that the dangerous part isn't knowing someone. It's acting on it without asking.
This week, the agent finally acts. Not on you, thankfully. On the kitchen.
If you've watched The Bear, you'll know the sound. An order gets called, and the whole line shouts "yes, chef!" before anyone has touched a pan. Once an order is fired, it's happening. Ingredients come out, prep starts, and someone's evening now revolves around that dish. You can't really un-fire it.
That's the moment this post is about.
Last time on Obi the Explorer, I gave the restaurant chatbot a second job. It could take a booking, and now it could answer questions about the menu. A Semantic Router sat near the front and chose which path a message took.
Last time on Obi the Explorer, I wrote about the design of the simplest possible restaurant chatbot. It had one job: to take a table booking. The surprising bit was that the LLM only did two of the seven jobs.
Recently, I've been playing around with cognitive architecture design. Don't worry, I'll dive into it in just a bit. But what I have found is that they make building AI agents easier because you have to actively invest in planning how data flows in and out, as well as the agent's decision-making, reasoning, grounding, and memory.
Over the last year, demand for intelligence has skyrocketed. Agentic AI is more popular than ever. However, the popularity of the infrastructure necessary for its acceleration is declining rapidly. Everybody hates datacenters. New York moved to block the construction of new hyperscale data centres, but Starcloud is here to save the day. Or is it?
Flock Safety's cameras have helped solve over a million crimes. Its audit tool just caught nine cops abusing the system in one day. Both of those facts are true, and neither one settles the actual question: who decides how much surveillance is worth how much safety and who gets to check the checker?
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