Give Your Agents a Personality

I grew up watching my dad religiously catch the Wednesday night episode of Top Gear with May, Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson. The unmatched production quality of each episode, topped with Clarkson’s narration, defined a generation of cars. It’s hard to forget Clarkson describing a BMW M3. And those of us who grew up obsessing over cars in that era usually thought in Clarkson’s voice.

What Clarkson was to cars, Bourdain was to food, travel, culture and people. The unmatched tone, the narration, and the disdain for fluff captivated audiences who were willing to open their minds to worlds beyond their borders.

With AI finally having arrived, I’d still struggle to find narration and voices that would hold my attention like the two of them. It’s hard to argue that production quality has skyrocketed, and most of the technology needed to make a brilliant show has been here for a while, but I’d struggle to name one car or travel show that I’d eagerly wait to watch. Bourdain and Clarkson had strong opinions and a distinct voice, and I want more of that now.

Many of us were fortunate to follow the rise of Ruby and the Rails community, and it had some great personalities and strong voices. I also distinctly recall Adrian Cockcroft’s talk about microservices and speed. I wonder if I’d have cared about Ruby if not for the passionate advocacy and the passionately opinionated software. Python already existed and I know for sure I prefer Python over Ruby now, but I spent a good 8 years of my career obsessing over things that the Ruby community cared about. They taught me to care about how we built things.

Think about the slide from Cockcroft’s talk for a minute.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Our worlds have melted into bland, objective, opinionless markdown files. As an engineer, it’s probably the greatest time to be alive, with agents spawning and respawning at will over a terminal, and yet the second 15-page specification document of the day makes my mind melt. Almost like it was designed to kill my will to live. The irony is that I wouldn’t have cared half as much if it had been an interesting read. Lousy design still has a personality, an opinion. What was your vision? Where are you going with this?

What happened to selling your dream to the team first? If Bourdain were to describe this, it’d be a beige hum written by consensus. And yet most of us spend our Tuesday afternoons suffering through it without resistance, silently hoping an agent can parse it and summarize the details of what’s going to keep me miserable for the rest of the evening. All those tokens and prompts, and we proudly declare this hostage note “ready for development”.

So for the love of all things precious, give your agents some personality. Make them write the way you’d explain something to a drunk uncle. Do more than you’re already doing, because right now it just looks like AI is manifesting the state of your mind.