Looking for Someone to Build Your AI Agent?
Don’t bother, says Alan Pentz. There’s no one to call.
Good morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Josh Patrick writes about the red flags he missed when he first tried to sell his business.
For gas station owners, it’s a trickier time to set prices than you might imagine.
A San Diego startup thinks people will pay to go to strangers’ weddings.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Despite growing demand, Alan Pentz says there’s no one to call to build you an AI agent: “It isn’t that no one is trying. It’s that the people doing this well are too busy doing it to sell it, and the people selling it loudly almost universally can’t ship. The traditional dev shop quotes $250,000 and 12 weeks for something a kid with a laptop and Claude Code could prototype over a weekend. The fly-by-night ‘AI agency’ that DMs you on LinkedIn quotes $15,000 and hands you a demo that breaks the moment you point it at real data. Both are wrong, in opposite directions.”
“I keep getting asked because the need is real. AI agents can do incredible things for your business. On the other hand I can’t find qualified people to build them at a price and with a business model that makes sense. I run a software business and a consulting firm and I’m an investor in two AI companies. I have built agents that work in production. I know what good looks like. And I cannot, with a straight face, point an owner at a vendor and say go there. Not yet.”
“What an SMB owner actually needs is someone who can sit in their office, ride along on a sales call, watch the front desk wrestle a spreadsheet, and get them a better solution by Friday. That’s a different profession than software engineering. It’s what happens when code and other knowledge work collapse into each other. It’s what happens when a smart generalist can build software with relative ease. I call it knowledge programming.”
“If you’re an SMB owner who has been told to wait for the right vendor, two paths actually exist right now. One: get a Claude Cowork subscription, sit with it for 90 days, and stop treating AI as something you outsource. Two: keep an eye on this corner of the internet, because the people I’m training will be available, and they will not look like a dev shop or an agency.” READ MORE
