Lauren Tan Reveals How to Build a 21+ Agent GrokBot Team

And with GrokBot, we really wanted to take a fresh perspective on what would it look like if your agent was really more like a colleague.

And so I started thinking about how would I make it so my agents can just automatically fix bugs for me while I sleep.

And so that was the inspiration for some of our earlier experiments with building a more persistent bot.

If you invest a lot in having early...

The way I see engineers' roles evolve in the agent world is, like I mentioned, you're sort of like an engineering manager for your agents.

But I think a big part of our responsibility now

as engineers is also to keep the code base in a condition where product managers, designers can contribute high-quality code.

okay so I assume you can see my screen yes yeah so

yeah today yeah I think I think the big theme for

me as I've been using agents to write code

and I'm sure a lot of you have had the same experience as well

is how do you trust it you know especially if

you are an engineer that's been writing code for a very long time you have a lot of opinions and lessons that you've learned about doing good engineering.

And when you see agents just, you know, winging it and, you know, guessing, hallucinating, you know, confidently stating that they found the smoking gun for the hundredth time,

but it's actually not the real problem, you lose a lot of trust.

And when you lose, when you don't have much trust in your agents, I feel like you really can't get the most out of them.

And for me, the parallel is like with management. uh

so if I'm an uh manager an engineering manager of a team

and I have a bunch of you know I have a team

of engineers uh on my team and

I don't trust them then the mode of operation I'm

going to be in is going to be like micromanagement right I'll have to spend a lot of time looking over my reports shoulders and checking that they're doing their work well you know that they're not shipping bugs to production.

And so I drew this chart because it's not a very scientific chart, but this is how I imagine myself and my journey through using agents.

So, you know, like fast forward

or back forward or

fast back, fast backwards, like a year or so when, you know, nobody was or not many people

were using agents to code, I think you

get into this mode where

you are very

heavily in the loop with one or several,

like a handful of agents, and you find yourself just constantly trying to understand what your agents are doing, and you're very, very in the loop.

You're watching every single output. You are sitting there prompting, and you really can't parallelize beyond that because you don't, again, you don't have that trust, right?

You can't go to 100 agents, like spawn 100 agents when you don't even trust the output of one agent.

So over the past five months, I feel like I've really been able to ascend this trust curve.

And now I'm at the point where I actually have,

this sounds kind of scary to say this, and it makes me sound like a slop artist, but I promise I'm not.

But I actually have my agents now auto-merging PRs for me, which is like a wild thing to say.

But I woke up today and there were like 20 PRs landed and I just reviewed them on main, like they were already landed.

And they were good. So how did I get to that point? It's basically what I wanted to talk about today.

And again, feel free to jump in if you have questions, Colin. um but uh oh yeah of course i gotta show this this chart uh where uh

no do not trust to someone requested

to control my computer uh probably won't do that

uh but yeah so this chart i think i i'm sharing this chart not to kind of like flex but to kind of

show like the journey like so you can see like the curve like

it sort of like inversely matches the contributions

I've been able to land at Cursor so I

joined five months ago and five months ago like I you

know my first month I was like not very productive because

I was you know I was learning the code base didn't know what the heck was going on and as I got more confident in my

agents uh i've really been able to kind of ramp

up my productivity uh and again

like yeah like last month i shipped a thousand prs