AI agents have created more possibilities for engineers than ever before. But what does daily life actually look like for the builders who've gone all in?
In my very first panel episode, I sit down with Adam Anzuoni from Cursor, Taylor Dolezal from Dosu, and Peter Bell from Gather.dev. Three builders running agents every day for real work, not demos. Peter runs nine API plans across three Mac Minis, with built-in adversarial review. Adam manages cloud agents from his phone. Taylor is building the context infrastructure that makes agent knowledge portable across teams.
We get into deterministic pipelines, skill systems that become their own technical debt, and what all three kept coming back to: attention is now the bottleneck. When agents can do everything, deciding what deserves your focus is the actual hard problem.
Three setups. One shared constraint. A conversation worth hearing.
Topics discussed:
- Attention as the real bottleneck when agents can do everything
- Deterministic pipelines vs. agentic orchestration — when to use scripts and when to use agents
- Peter's system: nine API plans, three Mac Minis, adversarial review, self-improving context
- Adam on Cursor cloud agents and managing builds from his phone
- Taylor on context distribution — making accumulated knowledge available to ephemeral agents
- The skill maintenance problem and why agent systems become their own technical debt
- The ADHD-like productivity loop that agent-driven work creates
- Plans matter more than prompts — all three panelists converged on this
- Intermediate artifacts as the key to quality output
- Product mindset as the engineer's next high-value skill
- Sandboxes, governance, and why "approve, approve, approve" puts your hard drive at risk
General podcast links
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@alexasinput
Read: https://alexasinput.substack.com/
Listen: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/alexagriffith/
More: https://linktr.ee/alexagriffith
Learn more about the host
Website: https://alexagriffith.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexa-griffith/
X: https://x.com/alexa_griffith_
Find out more about the guests
Adam Anzuoni
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamanz/
Website: https://www.adamanzuoni.com/
Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/
Taylor Dolezal
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/onlydole/
Website: https://onlydole.dev/
Dosu: https://dosu.dev/
Peter Bell
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterfbell/
Gather.dev: https://gather.dev/
O'Reilly Book: Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering
Resources mentioned in this episode
Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/
Dosu: https://dosu.dev/
Gather.dev: https://gather.dev/
Anthropic Claude: https://www.anthropic.com/
The Phoenix Project (book reference by Taylor)
Kelsey Hightower productivity survey (referenced by Taylor)
