First of all, this is more than just note taking. It appears to be a (yet another) harness for coordinating work between agents with minimal human intervention. And as such, shouldn’t part of the point be to not have to build that mental model yourself, but rather offload it to the shared LLM “brain”?
Highly debatable whether it’s possible to create anything truly valuable (valuable for the owner of the product that is) with this approach, though. I’m not convinced that it will ever be possible to create valuable products from just a prompt and an agent harness. At that point, the product itself can be (re)created by anyone, product development has been commodified, and the only thing of value is tokens.
My hypothesis is that “do things that don’t scale”[0] will still apply well into the future, but the “things that don’t scale” will change.
All that said, I’ve finally started using Obsidian after setting up some skills for note taking, researching, linking, splitting, and restructuring the knowledge base. I’ve never been able to spend time on keeping it structured, but I now have a digital secretary that can do all of the work I’m too lazy to do. I can just jot down random thoughts and ideas, and the agent helps me structure it, ask follow-up questions, relate it to other ongoing work, and so on. I’m still putting in the work of reading sources and building a mental model, but I’m also getting high-quality notes almost for free.
If you think of an agent harness as a tool which you use to build your product, then I think you might be absolutely right. I don't see it being easy for a harness to ever build a product.
I actually think that the harnesses which do end up building products, the harness will be the product.
As an example, I have a harness which I have my entire team use consistently. The harness is designed for one thing: to get the results I get with less nuanced understanding of why I get it.
Mind you, most of my team members are non-technical, or at least would be considered non-technical, two years ago.
These days, I spend most of my time fine-tuning the harness. What that gives me is a team which is producing at 5x their capacity from three months ago, and I get easier to review, more robust pull requests that I have more confidence in merging.
It's still a far cry from automating the entire process. I still think humans need to give the outcomes to even the harnesses to produce the results.
Hey, one of the contributors to Wuphf here
I think your take is right. This isn't going to help with the internalization of knowledge that note taking will get you. I do think that there is some value in the way we've set up blueprints of agents if you haven't set up a business before to either teach about role functions in a business or get a head start on business that doesn't create something new. At the very least it's a quick setup to getting to experiment.
To the part about note taking (and disclosure) - we are working on a context graph product that lessens the work of reading sources, especially over time and breath to help with a lot of the structure you've mentioned.
> My hypothesis is that “do things that don’t scale”[0] will still apply well into the future, but the “things that don’t scale” will change.
Say more?