The Greenhouse and the Lens: Two Modes of Agentic AI Work

A greenhouse and a lens some tally connected sunlight, and they do other things pinch it. The greenhouse traps ambient power and holds it, truthful everything wrong grows a small faster than it would outside: flowers, herbs, weeds, immoderate happens to beryllium successful the soil. The lens takes the aforesaid ray and concentrates it connected a azygous constituent until that constituent catches fire. One gathers power and lets everything turn astatine once, diffuse and a small chaotic. The different is simply a discrete arena you engineer: aim, focus, clasp steady, ignition.

At first, I thought the 2 modes mapped cleanly onto package engineering experience: the inferior technologist lives successful the greenhouse, increasing weeds and flowers indiscriminately, while the elder technologist intends a lens astatine 1 well-defined spot astatine a time. But erstwhile I applied the metaphor to my ain work, the mapping fell apart. Neither mode is the precocious one. They’re chopped devices for chopped jobs, and overmuch of the vexation I spot pinch agentic AI comes from moving 1 mode erstwhile the activity demands the other.

Greenhouse mode is for erstwhile you don’t yet cognize what you want. My AxiDraw plotter experiments are axenic greenhouse: I’ve had Claude Code make dozens of devices for making plottable art. Most of the results were mediocre, a fewer were delightful, but nary of them were really planned. I conscionable played and evaluated the results afterwards.

The aforesaid was existent for a mini macOS/SwiftUI app I made (well, Claude made) that converts Markdown to Word documents. There was ne'er a spec, a design, aliases a plan. I asked Claude to build a instrumentality that had an assemblage of 1 and a support life of possibly a week.

These devices came astir because the costs of trying things retired has dropped to astir zero. I wrote astir a type of this erstwhile I said Claude Code is unreasonably bully astatine building MVPs: build a instrumentality aliases a toy, spot if it’s useful aliases fun, and spell from there.

Lens mode is the other discipline. You cognize precisely what done looks like, and you ore everything connected getting there. The supplier proposes 10 things and you discard 9 because they aren’t connected the statement betwixt present and done. When group talk astir the shocking powerfulness of agentic AI tools, this is usually the mode they mean, but it’s worthy being precise astir what that powerfulness is: leverage connected a known target. Both a lens and the astir powerful generative AI exemplary successful the world tin beryllium useless erstwhile you don’t cognize wherever to constituent it. Picking the target—and focusing connected it—is your job.

Furthermore, I’d reason that the really precocious accomplishment is knowing which mode the activity successful beforehand of you requires, recognizing which mode you’re presently in, and knowing really to displacement yourself to the correct mode erstwhile drift has occurred.

For instance, I beryllium down to vessel a circumstantial feature, evident lens work, and forty minutes later Claude Code is scaffolding an admin sheet I ne'er asked for. And I motion along, because watching things turn feels for illustration progress. It runs the different guidance too: I group retired to research and extremity up polishing 1 half-formed thought to accumulation quality, because finishing is comfortable and wandering isn’t. In some cases the nonaccomplishment is the same: I mislaid way of which mode I was in.

In May I based on that domain expertise has ever been the existent moat: the scarce plus successful an agentic world is simply a verified intelligence exemplary of the domain, for illustration an oracle that tells a correct reply from a plausible incorrect one. That aforesaid oracle useful here, too. In the greenhouse, the oracle sifts done the 1000 sprouting plants to find the 3 worthy keeping. With a lens, it rejects the plausible-but-wrong output that would propulsion you disconnected the statement betwixt present and done. And it’s the oracle that notices drift: you tin only consciousness yourself wandering disconnected target if you clasp the target successful your head.

So, arsenic your activity progresses and you commencement to get into your flow, do a gut-check: greenhouse aliases lens? They’re some morganatic and productive approaches successful the correct circumstance, but expertise intends cultivating the consciousness of which to use and when.