Cassandra King (BOSS.Tech)

PH builders: what are key lessons you ve learned whether technical or product or GTM from building agents? This is still such a new discipline that it would be great to share amongst this community of builders.

I ll kick off with an experience that had us scratching our heads for months last year

Despite their immense popularity in China, SuperApps (multifunctional platforms that combine services like messaging, payments, shopping, and more into a single app) have yet to gain significant traction in the United States. This discrepancy raises intriguing questions about cultural differences, technological infrastructure, and consumer behavior.

One key factor is the fragmented nature of the United States' financial and tech ecosystem. Unlike China, where Alipay and WeChat Pay dominate the market due to a unified financial system and government support, the US has a diverse array of payment gateways, banks, and fintech solutions. Integrating these into a single SuperApp is not only logistically challenging but also requires navigating complex regulatory landscapes.

Moreover, american consumers have grown accustomed to niche apps tailored for specific tasks: such as Venmo for peer-to-peer payments or Paypal for digital purchases.
The US market has also been slower to adopt all-in-one platforms, reflecting a cultural preference for specialized solutions over overarching ones.

There s a lot of discussion on X and other places about the future of software development. As with many things in life, the reality is both complex and in the middle of the extreme viewpoints. What we re seeing at Tonkotsu:

• Agents are fast and powerful, but make mistakes. They can t operate unsupervised. We think they re like unreliable compilers.

• That means developers are as critical as ever, but their role shifts to being managers of coding agents.

• This transformation means developers need to be focused on planning and verification, while delegating coding. The role has become barbell-shaped, and the industry needs new tools and workflows to accommodate this.

More here https://blog.tonkotsu.ai/p/manag...