Spring is finally here 🍀

I've already managed to type outside on a couple of days. The magnolia is in full bloom. It's still light at 8pm. Fellow Swedes — we survived another winter.

This is also the time of year I do most of my gardening, and one of my favorite quotes comes back around: "Gardening is the belief in tomorrow." It's the part I keep thinking about when people ask me about AI right now. Plant things. See what grows. You don't have to know exactly what you're doing.

Which brings me to what I planted this week.

I now have a small consulting firm in the basement.

Five AI agents, all running on a Mac mini, all named after TV characters. Harvey handles my contracts and the awkward client conversations. Donna takes Harvey's notes and turns them into actual writing. Mike remembers everything I send him — articles, places, ideas at 11pm. Louis worries about money in exactly the way a financial advisor should. And Wendy, the newest hire, reads everyone else's logs and tells them what they could be doing better. An agent whose job is to coach the other agents.

There's no clever orchestration framework holding it together. They share a folder. They write markdown files to each other. That's it.

​I wrote a piece about it because most of the AI agent conversation right now is pitching some version of "team of bots that runs your business while you sleep," and that's not what this is. The team in the basement isn't running anything autonomously. If I unplugged the Mac mini tomorrow, my business would keep running. The whole thing exists because I wanted to play.

Or, to come back to the gardening — I wanted to plant things and see what grows.

I think that's the part designers especially can't afford to skip right now. Not because we need to keep up with the agent hype, but because the people who'll do interesting work with this stuff in two years are the ones playing with it badly today.

Anyway. The full piece, including why I named them after Suits characters and what each one actually does day-to-day, is here:

→ The basement firm​

Until next time,
Anton

Four things

1. ​Brian Lovin on leveling up with AI as a designer — A long Dive Club conversation with one of the designers I pay closest attention to, walking through how his actual workflow has changed at Notion.
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2. ​Agents with taste — Emil Kowalski on how to teach your agents what great feels like, with the actual skill files he uses for animation.
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3. ​Everyone should be using Claude Code more — Lenny's case for thinking of Claude Code less as a coding tool and more as Claude with access to your computer, with fifty examples from non-technical people.
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4. ​Reluctantly Influential: inside Lenny Rachitsky's demandingly chill life — A long profile that quietly dismantles the idea that "chill" and "obsessive" are opposites.