Hard things

One of our favorite books at janyl is “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. It talks about some of the hardest problems a business faces, and gets into a meta analysis about what actually makes problems hard as opposed to just annoying or exhausting.

We hear all the time about janyl agents that solve hard problems, but sometimes, we’re floored by the ingenuity of agents in places where humans need help. We should note here that most of this ingenuity comes from the models themselves, like Claude and GPT. We play our small part in getting them the right information and context, but we are amazed and humbled by the quality of their products.

One time, managers of a company were worried that a small team within it had “quietly quit”, meaning showing up to work but underperforming due to a lack of motivation. They asked their agent for help, and they tried to understand what was wrong by asking the agent about details regarding the employees they could surmise by reading diverse public channels on their Slack.

The agent’s response, which they sent us, was “If you have to ask the question, perhaps you should ask yourself how well you’re communicating with that team in the first place. What makes you turn to me? Have you asked them the same question.” The agent actually chided management for its poor communication with the team and then coached managers on how to have better team meetings to discuss the problem.

What they found was that there was a form of passive-aggressive communication around unfinished work that was pervasive within the company. Everyone agreed to do a better job policing themselves about it, and the agent also regularly flagged issues it saw over written channels of communication when it felt a manager overstepped.

Over the next two months, the underperforming team’s KPIs improved dramatically, and they also began using the agent more in their day-to-day tasks as they came to realize ways in which it could be helpful beyond grabbing Jira tickets and synthesizing technical specs.

Hard problems within organizations are things like quietly quitting, overemployment, someone everyone works around instead of talking to, a team that stopped raising problems because nothing changed when it did, and a founder nobody will contradict. These are difficult to talk about, there are no easy answers, and it often represents significant communication gaps that no agent can bridge. But agents can help frame the problem and hold those in power responsible for fixing it.