The field manual · 13 essays
Essays on proactive agents.
Adapted from internal positioning docs, postmortems, and the kind of design notes that usually live and die in PR descriptions. New ones appear roughly monthly — weather permitting.
- N°13
May 13, 2026 · 7 min
What proactive agents actually cost
Every team building proactive agents hits the same wall — always-on means always spending. The ones shipping anyway found patterns worth stealing.
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- N°12
May 12, 2026 · 8 min
A review agent in three acts
My Senior Dev started as a webhook-triggered PR reviewer. Then it went multi-surface. Then it learned to watch. Each phase taught us something about what proactive agents actually need.
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- N°11
May 11, 2026 · 7 min
What makes proactive agents hard to build
Proactive agents look simple in demos. In production, three problems compound: knowing when to wake up, remembering across runs, and knowing when to stay quiet.
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- N°10
May 11, 2026 · 6 min
The proactive agent wish list
A personal list of agents I want but don't have yet, across music, news, money, and work. Every entry needs the same three things.
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- N°09
May 11, 2026 · 6 min
The prompt can't save you
Two pieces from the OpenClaw ecosystem show why proactive agents need a runtime, not a better system prompt.
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- N°08
May 11, 2026 · 9 min
Where push architectures break
Push architectures break in specific, painful ways. Here's where webhooks fail and what production mitigation looks like.
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- N°07
May 11, 2026 · 3 min
What would a magical agent actually do?
The best agents feel like an amazing intern who already handled the thing you were about to ask about. That's plumbing, not prompts.
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- N°06
May 11, 2026 · 7 min
ChatGPT Pulse and the missing primitives
ChatGPT Pulse has one of the three primitives a proactive agent needs. Here's what's missing and what indispensable would look like.
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- N°05
May 11, 2026 · 8 min
Building the weekly-digest agent: a production postmortem
Our weekly-digest agent scans four sources, clusters mentions, and files a GitHub issue. Here's what worked and what broke.
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- N°04
May 10, 2026 · 7 min
Proactive agents need three primitives
A proactive agent needs three things: a clock, a listener, and an inbox, wired together with durable state. Here's why.
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- N°03
May 10, 2026 · 10 min
The eight-week webhook tax
Adding one webhook provider to a proactive agent takes a sprint. Four providers takes most of a quarter. Here's the real cost.
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- N°02
May 10, 2026 · 5 min
The genesis
It started with three terminal windows and too much copy-pasting. The inbox came first, then the clock, then the listener.
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- N°01
May 10, 2026 · 4 min
Reactive vs proactive, with examples
The same agent written twice: reactive and proactive. Same goal, same provider, different posture. The difference is who waits for whom.
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