Treating Agents Like People

The Good Stuff, with Pete and Andy - Episode 39: The Big Stuff

Hosts: Pete and Andy

Pete accidentally calls it "The Big Stuff" and decides to run with it. They dive into Dumpling Town—a game Pete built with his daughter in 90 minutes that now has an economy, side quests, and soy sauce rivers. Treating agents like humans, building family chat apps to avoid WhatsApp, the new Hal orchestration agent, and reflections on a year of shipping software.

Key Moments:

[01:48] Building Dumpling Town: Animal Crossing meets dumplings.

[03:43] The creative genius of kids: "Why don't kids make all of the games?"

[04:48] Level Up - Touch Don't Look for schools.

[08:44] Starting with Nostr: get logins and authentication for free, no password recovery needed

[09:53] Built a Nostr-based gratitude journal: encrypted, runs in the house, wife can use it too

[11:40] The Nostr database assumption: you don't have to store everything on relays

[12:51] Full encryption in the Slack competitor—can't see database data without the key

[15:05] Treating agents like humans: they're just npubs in the room, add them to groups or don't

[16:10] Andy's approach: "I treat them very much like I treat my humans—mush, mush, do it now"

[16:44] Health graph experiment: building while talking to Claude, using sub-agent for graph construction

[18:32] Interface matters: weird to have deep conversations in the terminal

[19:57] Marginal gains as the pre-planning space for Wingman—natural workflow emerged

[24:07] Health-specific interface: makes sense to have constraints around what agents do

[25:03] Dumpling Town expansion: everyone gets their own town, planes between towns, Olympic Dumpling Island

[26:42] This is invaluable education for young kids—unlimited creativity meets approachable tools

[28:00] Schools could run their own Wingman—teachers should love it

[29:15] Learning from first principles: hand-coding microprocessors in binary teaches abstraction value

[31:00] Should people still learn to code? "What do you mean should? People who want to will"

[32:27] Be the Japanese woodworker, not the IKEA table producer competing with robots

[33:07] Gigi's realization: "Fuck, it's fun again—now I can create, I just think things into the world"

[38:06] Built family chat app: encrypted, data lives in the house, kids can message without WhatsApp

[41:21] The one-shot fallacy: Twitter theatre vs actual building over two weeks

[44:44] The container for AI is the business, not the app—software serves the business

[47:00] Re-win amplification: personalized software that does exactly what you want

[48:52] Family as a business: shared calendar, action lists, silly memes channel, pocket money with wallets

[51:26] Mission accomplished for 2025: developed the muscle for shipping software

[52:32] GitHub tracker shows the progress: scattered commits to daily by end of year

[54:29] The wrong framing: doesn't matter if you can't one-shot—two weeks is still 1000x faster

[56:52] Pay-per-day pricing model: 21 sats a day, buy a week and see how it goes

[59:44] Starter kit idea: preload authentication and payment interface for rapid deployment

[1:00:02] Introducing Hal: named after Hal Finney, orchestrates and manages all running apps

[1:03:12] Level Up: the game workshop name—sounds right, move on

[1:05:07] MCP with Blender: could solve the Dumpling Town sprite problem

[1:07:09] Look Marks: Gigi's app that treats eye emojis as bookmarks—because Nostr is open

[1:08:00] Christmas phone detox: collapsed screen time, more quiet deliberate time

[1:09:41] Raw dogging everything: no music, no podcasts, just silence—harder than expected