Window into the Future

On Tuesday, Anthropic launched Claude Tag: a version of Claude that lives inside a Slack channel as a shared teammate. You tag it the way you'd tag a colleague, hand it a task, and it works away while you get on with something else. There's even an "ambient" mode where it doesn't wait to be tagged. It watches the channel and jumps in when it reckons it should.

For over a year the question was "are you using AI?" but now it’s "how does your team work when there's an agent in the room?"

The people who build this stuff are excited, and their reason is more interesting than "cool robot." The argument, made by Andrej Karpathy and the Latent Space crowd, is that an agent was never really held back by how clever the model is. It was held back by where it lived.

A chatbot in a separate tab only helps if you remember to open it, paste in the context, and copy the answer back out. An agent that already sits where the work happens, with the memory and the access, skips all of that. Karpathy called it the third big redesign of how we work with AI. He also said that the payoff only shows up once the dull, hard plumbing is done aka the security, the memory, the permissions.

Not everyone's sold though. The worry, from people like Ashwin Gopinath, is about what your Slack becomes over time, the place that holds every decision, every "we tried that in Q2 and it died," every half-finished thread. Let one vendor's agent be the thing that remembers all of it and you stop renting a clever model and start renting your own company's memory back from them. The open-source camp, Santiago and others, say own the layer yourself and never get married to one provider. Reasonable. Though it's worth noticing that most of the loudest critics happen to sell the alternative.

Ethan Mollick made a good point. While leadership debates whether to build an in-house AI stack, the employees have already decided. They want the same tool they use at home, and they'll keep asking IT until they get it. Nobody's waiting for permission. People are already using AI at work on their own. Claude Tag just makes it official.

The change that matters more and that’s easy to miss in my opinion is the second you tag an agent and hand it a job, you've stopped using a tool and started managing one. You start feeding it context, setting limits, checking its work, figuring out when to trust it and when it's wrong. That's management. And most people on your team have never managed anyone. Claude Tag doesn't just drop a new worker into the channel. It makes everyone in there a first-time manager, overnight, with nobody to show them how.

You can't buy a team that manages this well, and you can't get there overnight. You build it on purpose. So the ones who come out fine will be the ones who already manage well, or who decide to get good at it. Anthropic's own blog basically says this: what makes a human-and-agent team work are clear roles, writing things down, building trust over time, keeping a person on the calls that matter which is just good management. None of it is new. The agent only makes skipping it more expensive. (Which is most of why 100 School exists. The behaviour change is the part that sticks when the tool gets swapped out from under you.)

How to AI 🤖 

Every week, this section is your shortcut. Here are a couple of ways you could try AI this week that are worth your time:

• How to build a human-and-agent team that actually holds together.

• How to set up Claude Tag in your team's Slack.

• How Claude Tag actually works from the people who built it.

• How to use ambient mode in Claude Tag.

Before you go ✌️

If an AI showed up in your team's channel tomorrow, would your people know how to work with it? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.

See you next week!