Make Your AI Agents Compete with Harper Reed

Software used to cost something to write. Now the hardest part is knowing what to do once it doesn't. Harper Reed (https://www.linkedin.com/in/harperreed), CEO at 2389 Research (https://www.linkedin.com/company/2389-research/), joins us to talk about what happens to software development when the cost of writing code drops to zero. Harper built Test Kitchen, a tool that runs the same feature five different ways and lets you judge the winner, and he's candid about the tools he's built in the past that scaled in directions he didn't expect. KEY TAKEAWAYS 00:00 Harper Reed's biography spans juggling, anarchism, the Obama campaign, and a social network built for AI agents 01:06 Harper built his AI agents and their own social media platform before this became an industry trend 12:21 Early evals found tasks were completed more effectively with the social media plugin installed than without it 16:40 The cost of writing code is approaching zero, and that changes everything about process 17:33 Test Kitchen builds the same feature multiple times and lets you or an AI judge pick the winner 23:16 Harper defines exciting software as something with personality, not raw speed 24:15 Harper built tools that later fed directly into the Cambridge Analytica playbook 31:10 Harper argues the industry does not ask often enough whether it should build something 49:46 Omakase means trusting the model’s judgment instead of specifying every decision yourself 50:10 2389 Research has built roughly 50 internal skills, most centered on parallel exploration and judged review 52:04 2389 Research was founded on a bet that AI agents can make work more human, not less See how people are actually using AI in their work on the "AI Worth Using" podcast: https://aiworthusing.com. RESOURCES MENTIONED 2389 Research website: Harper Reed's company, where the tools and experiments discussed in this episode were built: https://2389.ai/ Test Kitchen (skill directory): Harper's skill that builds a feature multiple times and uses an AI judge to pick the best version: https://2389.ai/products/test-kitchen/ Omakase (Test Kitchen's parallel-build workflow): Test Kitchen's parallel-exploration mode: hands a model a spec and lets it build with minimal guardrails: https://2389.ai/posts/omakase-show-me/ Binary RE (binary reverse-engineering skill): A binary reverse-engineering skill Harper says is strong enough that Fable refuses to run it: https://github.com/2389-research/binary-re/blob/main/skills/SKILL.md Thrifty (heavier-model planning, lighter-model execution skill): Uses a heavier model to plan and a lighter model to execute, cutting token cost by about 60%: https://github.com/2389-research/thrifty Deliberation (Quaker-practice-inspired agent skill): Built by co-founder Dylan; applies Quaker consensus practices to how agents make decisions: https://skills.2389.ai/plugins/deliberation/ Review Squad (multi-agent review skill): A lightweight multi-agent review pass run on finished work: https://github.com/wan-huiyan/agent-review-panel 2389 Research paper on agent social-media use and task performance: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13547 #AIagents #BuildInPublic #SoftwareEngineering