this week on changing on the fly, the original x spaces crashed. we spun up a second one and got into it. 45 minutes with shills on agent operating systems, education, and starting from zero.

if you don’t know her: 23 years in tech. corporate chaos coordinator. neurodivergent. learned it from her grandmother, who was coding on a dome computer at honeywell back in the eighties. art and tech have always been the same thing for her.

she runs 36 agents. not hypothetically. in production. grant writers, research agents, art curators, a music composition team, legal, compliance, risk, operations. a full command center dashboard she built herself. she doesn’t do admin work anymore. she reads the outputs and refines.

but here’s the thing that hit different.

shills didn’t lead with the 36 agents. she led with the gap.

the education gap. the fact that nobody is teaching fundamentals. institutions can’t keep up with how fast the tools are moving. companies like amazon handed the reins to ai too early and ate it publicly. people are being told to “use ai” without anyone showing them what ai even is.

most people don’t know what an llm is. they think ai is new. it’s been around since the fifties. university courses in scotland in the sixties. understanding the history of something is a good place to start.

shills took that seriously. she set up open office hours at her company. cold blasted 2,000 people. friday, 30 minutes, bring your challenges. 200 to 300 people show up. no slides. no lecture. just “what’s your problem, let’s solve it together on screen.”

her approach was simple. ask someone: what is something today that bothers you that you wish you didn’t have to do? let them answer. then reframe it as a prompt, live, on screen, word by word, explaining why you chose each directive word. she said light bulbs just start going off when you break the barriers down.

she’s taking it local now. partnered with a brewery in her hometown of 75,000 people. big screen tv. free education sessions. beer optional. because the gap isn’t going to close itself from the timeline.

shills also dropped a security beat worth hearing. secret scan. if you’re pulling repos from strangers, claude can scan for hidden malware before you ever run the code. people are putting spyware in public repos and waiting for you to download it. make secret scan a part of your definition of done.

her masterclass is coming. free fundamentals. paid deep dives. not because she needs the money. she has a good job and she’s doing this on her own time. her site is wewayassessment.com. the we way™. use code FAMFIRST for the full version with personalized recommendations and a 1-of-1 generative art piece. she’s also on substack at substack.com/@shills81.

after shills hopped off, the three of us stayed on to close it out.

micro said something that stuck with me. he said the output is the only thing that matters. i pushed back. the prompt is king. you don’t get an output without a good input no matter the middle ground.

then he clarified. he didn’t mean the deliverable. he meant the next piece of information that lets you make a decision. that’s the real output. the decision.

good distinction. we got there by disagreeing on air, which is kind of the whole point.

micro asked me where agents become an operating system. i’d been thinking about it the whole episode. for me, the line gets crossed when agents start talking to each other and disagreeing with each other. actually reaching conclusions, not just running tasks.

every morning i wake up and there’s a full conversation between my agents discussing the work i did the day before. that’s something closer to an operating system for how i run my day.

shills has 36 agents. i run 3 voices. different numbers, different targets. we both crossed the same line: the system argues with itself before it delivers.

that’s the threshold.

if you’re watching from the sideline: don’t just sit back and watch. build something. don’t worry about building something impressive. find something measurable. something you already do. something with friction. that’s where the small win is. that’s the place to start.

shills is offering free 15 to 30 minute sessions soon. we’ll share the link when it drops.

we’re back next thursday at 1pm eastern. follow @shills_81. she’ll be back.

changing on the fly, ep 6. agent os, scale, and starting from zero.