This Week's Updates - October 17th

What shipped this week

• Many meetings happen without a clear action plan, and commitments often lack follow-through.  I believe all meeting actions should be written down and tracked, so I created a Commitment Tracker skill. 
• I am experimenting with a few changes to how Onboarding and the workspace experience on Skills and Agents work. A feed now shows what needs human intervention and what agents are running in the background. Read the full list of changes on Skills and Agents.
• I added a few more safeguards to my Chief of Staff workflow agent, including limitations on who can email the tool. 

What our friends are working on

• I worked with Jason Davis and Matt Walker at Simon Data. They are now on to something new with Mahalanobis Systems, with a mission to bring order to the chaos of agentic development. Their core product is a set of tools they call the Agent Optimization Toolkit (AOT). It's free, open source, and designed to help companies build high-quality evaluation suites, then optimize agent performance against them to efficiently improve speed, cost, and quality. The first piece, aot-evals, is out now.

Every agent needs an objective

Mahalanobis Systems enables the next generation of AI agents to run in an intelligent, measurable, cost-effective, and responsible manner.

Mahal Systems

What I'm reading this week

• How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard
• Everything Is a Ralph Loop - Geoffrey Huntley (ghuntley.com)
• Opinion | Bill Gates’s Blunt Warning on A.I.
• Charlie Munger’s Interview with Todd Combs