
Agents
Automation Leaves Humans the Hard Decisions
As AI absorbs routine work, people inherit a smaller stream of unresolved decisions that demands sharper attention and clearer presentation.
IntelligenceSnacks
Episode 71 guest
Paul Itoi is the founder and CEO of Stakwork and has been building technology companies since the mid 1990s.
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Paul Itoi is the founder and CEO of Stakwork and has been building technology companies since the mid 1990s. Stakwork is building infrastructure for turning complex cognitive work into reliable, repeatable systems of humans, agents, software and memory.
Paul is also closely associated with Sphinx, the open source Lightning Network project that combined encrypted communication, payments and machine mediated work.
Long before the current agent boom, Paul was already working on systems that decomposed complex tasks into smaller units, routed those units between humans and machines, paid people globally for completing them, and accumulated the resulting knowledge into reusable structures.

Agents
As AI absorbs routine work, people inherit a smaller stream of unresolved decisions that demands sharper attention and clearer presentation.

Software Systems
Complex expertise becomes easier to execute consistently when it is divided into small decisions that people, models and tools can handle separately.

Business & Markets
Machine customers can turn reusable information into a market by comparing the price of an existing artifact with the cost of creating it again.

Agents
Agents are useful for finding a path through unfamiliar work, but repeatable execution belongs in a bounded workflow.

Software Systems
Agents create lasting value when the processes they discover are captured as reusable software that runs reliably at a fraction of the original cost.

Software Systems
Reliable AI workflows keep known operations in ordinary code and call an agent only when flexible judgement is genuinely useful.

AI Models & Infrastructure
A polished AI answer can create more risk than value when a business needs work it can safely rely on.