I once had a friend coach me while playing Startcraft 2. He basically stood behind me and kept repeating “make more probes” while I played. That was 10x higher impact that anything else he could have taught me… at any moment I should be making more probes, since that means I’d mine more minerals/gas and could produce more of everything without getting resource constrained.
Is there anything semi-obvious but easy to forget that someone standing behind you should just keep reminding you to do?
I think the agent orchestration version of "make more probes" is "maximize the ability of agents to verify their output works". The scarce resource will increasingly be human attention - the more progress that can be made without a human in the loop, the more these systems will be able to get done.
Yes!! Yes yes yes yes! This article is the article I wished I'd written.
I’ve been thinking about this over the past year, and the best description I’ve had for this mindset is “systems thinking”. It’s the ability to work with interconnected componentized systems, swap out the pieces, and manage the whole.
In Starcraft, the components are units, buildings, and economy. In modern software delivery, it’s containers and pods and Kubernetes. And now we’re migrating to agent orchestrators and Gas Town.
And… humans have been thinking about this for a LONG time. The industrialists of yore built their empires on similar systems thinking (only with real humans instead of simulated AI humans). I bet there will be a lot to learn from early 20th century empire-builders.
Yes, systems thinking is it. One of the main jobs of a game designer is to create systems that integrate and interact with each other in useful, satisfying and interesting ways. I've found the experience of building products with agentic software development tools to be very similar.
Love the RTS comparison here. The attention allocation piece is exactlywhat nobody talks about with multi-agent systems, everyone obsesses over raw compute but the real bottleneck is human coordination capacity. Played way too much StarCraft back in college and the skill of knowing which process needs interevntion versus trusting autonomous behavior is spot on. The fact that Gas Town runs on tmux is hilarious but also proves we desperately need that UI layer you described.
I once had a friend coach me while playing Startcraft 2. He basically stood behind me and kept repeating “make more probes” while I played. That was 10x higher impact that anything else he could have taught me… at any moment I should be making more probes, since that means I’d mine more minerals/gas and could produce more of everything without getting resource constrained.
Is there anything semi-obvious but easy to forget that someone standing behind you should just keep reminding you to do?
I think the agent orchestration version of "make more probes" is "maximize the ability of agents to verify their output works". The scarce resource will increasingly be human attention - the more progress that can be made without a human in the loop, the more these systems will be able to get done.
Yes!! Yes yes yes yes! This article is the article I wished I'd written.
I’ve been thinking about this over the past year, and the best description I’ve had for this mindset is “systems thinking”. It’s the ability to work with interconnected componentized systems, swap out the pieces, and manage the whole.
In Starcraft, the components are units, buildings, and economy. In modern software delivery, it’s containers and pods and Kubernetes. And now we’re migrating to agent orchestrators and Gas Town.
And… humans have been thinking about this for a LONG time. The industrialists of yore built their empires on similar systems thinking (only with real humans instead of simulated AI humans). I bet there will be a lot to learn from early 20th century empire-builders.
Yes, systems thinking is it. One of the main jobs of a game designer is to create systems that integrate and interact with each other in useful, satisfying and interesting ways. I've found the experience of building products with agentic software development tools to be very similar.
Love the RTS comparison here. The attention allocation piece is exactlywhat nobody talks about with multi-agent systems, everyone obsesses over raw compute but the real bottleneck is human coordination capacity. Played way too much StarCraft back in college and the skill of knowing which process needs interevntion versus trusting autonomous behavior is spot on. The fact that Gas Town runs on tmux is hilarious but also proves we desperately need that UI layer you described.