The Power of Staying Current (and How Fast Everything Is Moving)
Recently I had to explain to our company president exactly how I work and what makes me effective. It is a harder question to answer than it sounds. The first thing I pointed to surprised both of us a little: I'm on X, formerly Twitter, every single day.
Real time, every level
On X I can see a developer who is just starting out post something clever, and a few posts later see a CFO or CIO announce a rollout, the moment it happens. The information arrives in real time from every level of the industry at once. No newsletter, conference, or analyst report moves at that speed.
The Muse and OpenClaw story
This month gave me a perfect example. Meta released an agentic app called Muse. It shot to the top of the App Store, and by the reporting I've seen it added more than $200 billion to Meta's market value.
Muse is, in large part, a take on the open-source project OpenClaw. That's the same kind of system we are rolling out internally at OSCO: multiple coordinated agents, each helping people with specific tasks.
People on X noticed quickly that Muse used some of the same file names as OpenClaw, including SOUL.md, the file that defines an agent's personality and behavior. The accusation of copying went public, and it played out in real time. Meta's side acknowledged that Muse was heavily inspired by OpenClaw and credited the project. As I read the exchange, the SOUL.md name stayed because it was simply the best description of what the file is: the soul of the system.
What stayed with me is this. Someone saw an idea about nine months ago, built their own version of it, probably with less work than anyone would admit, and created an enormous amount of value. If you weren't paying attention, you missed the whole thing.
Agents that talk to agents
Mark Zuckerberg made a point about Muse that I think is exactly right: the real power comes when agents talk to other agents. That's precisely what we are trying to build at work.
Picture every department, including purchasing, engineering, and the rest, with its own agent that specializes in that department's tasks. Each one is useful on its own. The real value appears when they start coordinating.
Here's a concrete example. An engineering agent notices that a component for a machine we're building is out of stock. Instead of just raising a flag, it asks the purchasing agent, which checks twenty or thirty vendors for lead time, price, and compatibility, finds acceptable alternates, and hands the engineer a link to buy the right part. The engineer never has to open a ticket with purchasing.
Solutions at the moment of discovery
The key shift is that the solution arrives at the same moment the problem is discovered. Most software today is good at surfacing problems. It's much rarer to have something that brings the fix along with it.
People work the same way. Nobody wants to work with someone who only brings problems. Everyone loves the colleague who notices something wrong and shows up already holding the answer. Agent-to-agent systems can be that colleague for an entire company.
Thirty minutes a morning
Staying connected has turned out to be one of the biggest keys to success I've found. My employer now actively wants me to spend thirty minutes every morning reading X. Who would have guessed that browsing the internet would become part of the job description, and that it would make me dramatically better at that job?
I'm writing some of this in a car that drives itself, while talking to Fable, which is probably the smartest publicly available AI in the world right now. It's a crazy world, and it's moving fast. The best thing you can do is keep up with it.