I am traveling today, so I won’t have time to make a detailed response. But here is a short interim response from my own (quite extensive) experience…
The issues that @Bill_French highlights are real. And a naive maker who uses Coda AI columns as if they were just another type of formula will run headlong into all these issues.
That is why we developed the “Agentix Framework” that I have been writing about here.
We have encountered each of those issues, and found a way to overcome them.
Our agents run reliably when required in an event-driven regime such that they never see the race conditions that Bill highlights, and everything is orchestrated so the AI inferences only execute when the data is available and the doc is stable.
At this point, we have deployed hundreds of such agents and have audit logs for thousands of runs that show they can be reliable enough to be used in a 6-sigma quality-controlled workflow (<3 defects per million runs).
But only at the cost of a lot of research, trial and error, and a strict TDD (test-driven development) paradigm that tracks and measures reliability.
But these issues can be addressed by the SH GO AI team to make it safe for Coda makers to use SuperDocs as a “skills runtime engine”. (They have been resolved by the Notion team.) So it is a question of more development work, not (i.m.h.o) a question of “the wrong paradigm”.
We are not there yet. The Agentix Framework does allow ordinary non-technical makers to build and run Agentic Workflows. But without such guardrails, those makers would run into the problems Bill illuminates.
But I am asking the SH GO team to implement those few changes needed to address the limitations presented by Bill, and then we will have the MOST powerful platform for building and running business automations.
(Grok Bot is amazing, and I am loving it, my new favorite lobster! But my clients need to harness the investment they have made in Coda expertise and existing automations - and the SH GO paradigm is the best way for them to do that.)
Bill has articulated so much more clearly than I could, all the reasons why we had to engineer our ‘Agentix Framework’ the way we did. Thanks Bill.
Respect
Max