John Collison: evaluation

Transcript context

…He wants tail and pipe— Exactly, all these things. Of course, now we're building that because it's much more relevant in the agentic world. But I find somehow, all the agentic stuff is also bringing back... I don't know if you have this experience as well. It's bringing back a lot of ideas that you might have had before. Well, it is because to some degree, the elegance of Unix, which has been the basis of why everyone wants SSH and the curl command that was famously on the Stripe homepage. For people who got it, it was remarkable because you could have all these tools that did something well that was small and useful, and you could chain them together to make something great. I wonder in the future, we've talked a lot about this, if you look at the canonical software-as-a-service application like Stripe's console, and obviously you have what consumers see, but the configuration that a Stripe customer will log into, you would have a web app, and that's the forms and fields and buttons and graphs, and then you have the API. It was typically like a REST API or GraphQL API, and you could do stuff with it. This is how computers talk and this is how humans used it. I wonder if the web application of the future will actually be... Certainly, you want a web app for the rare human who wants to sign in, but will you have an agent harness? What I mean by that is something more than the APIs, but just like if you think about the harness that you provide in a code base, the skills, the documentation, the rules. Imagine the person who's the greatest Stripe expert who knows how to extract the most value from their Stripe account. That's the harness. Not the API. That's the button you click. Will that be an endpoint on Stripe.com, and so that your agent knows how to just get the most value from Stripe? I imagine you don't care if your merchants log in. What you want them to do is drive value for themselves, drive GMV, drive payments. I'm really excited about that because an API is great. APIs are awesome. But a harness is basically like, here's the instruction manual for all the Unix commands that power Stripe. That's very interesting.…

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