Matt Van Horn on the agent-first workflow

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Written by AI

TLDR
Alex Lieberman profiles Matt Van Horn, cofounder of June, who never reads code, has agents write their own plans, and gets tasks by email.
Best for
Founders who hand build work to agents and never read the code.
The tip
Have the agent write itself a plan.md before every project. Make each run save what it learned to a markdown file, so the next run starts where the last one ended.
What you need
  • Compound Engineering
  • Telegram
  • a Mac
  • an email address for the agent
The prompt

Before you start, write yourself a plan.md for this project: the goal, the steps, and how you'll check each step is done. When you finish, add what you learned to notes.md so the next run starts from there.

our prompt
Start here
  1. Start every project by having the agent write its own plan.md.
  2. Have every run add what it learned to a markdown file.
  3. Give it the whole meeting transcript instead of a summary.

postThe source

Alex Lieberman@businessbarista

One of the most productive engineers I know cannot read code.

@mvanhorn is not an engineer by training. He co-founded June, has 44,000 GitHub stars, and got contributions merged into Go & Python.

I had him build live for an hour & walk me through his process.

My fav lessons & quotes from the convo:

  1. He never reads code. He does not have an IDE installed. In his words, "I fundamentally believe that very soon no humans should ever write any code and that no humans should ever read any code."
  2. Every project starts with the agent writing itself a plan.md file using Compound Engineering. Agents are lazy, he says, and the plan keeps them honest. He never reads the plan either. "Plans are for agents, you silly human."
  3. His CLIs leave notes for themselves. Each run records what it learned in a markdown file, so the next run starts where the last one ended. He calls them self-healing.
  4. His agent has an email address. From Telegram on his phone, he sends a task. It emails his Mac, authenticated, and the work starts while he is at his kids' soccer practice.
  5. He feeds whole transcripts, not summaries. After a two-hour meeting with a Google Ventures researcher, his agent read the researcher's entire book, wrote itself a report on every chapter, and turned it all into a plan for his business.
  6. Him yapping to his agents is like nerd ASMR. "Go agent go" is how he likes to finish telling the agent what to do.
  7. How he thinks about this next chapter of building: "Every generation of tools moves the engineer's job up a level. The code was never the point. The problem was."
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Highlights

  • He never reads code. He does not have an IDE installed.

    The whole premise in one line

  • Each run records what it learned in a markdown file, so the next run starts where the last one ended.

    Self-healing CLIs, cheap to copy

  • He feeds whole transcripts, not summaries.