🗂️ "An AI Agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal." - Simon Willison​

Hello Reader,

Generative AI makes things for you. Agentic AI does things for you.

This distinction, between making and doing, is the next step on the exponential curve of capability.

An AI Agent can initiate and execute tasks independently, finding the best way to transition from an initial state to a goal state by using any tools it has available, as often as it is capable of doing.

In his excellent primer on AI Agents, Agentic Design Patterns, Antonio Gullí defines the agentic loop in 5 stages:

1. Get the mission.
2. Scan the scene.
3. Think it through.
4. Take action.
5. Learn and get better.

When you understand the mechanics of the agentic loop (observe, reason, and act) you can stop prompting for responses, and begin composing loops instead.

This is something I help intermediate-to-advanced AI operators do in my 300-level workshops. I am hosting an 8-week sprint to ship agentic workflows, next month in Christchurch in the AI Agent Accelerator.

• 1 October: Ai301 – Context Engineering
• 8 October: Ai302 – Agent Management
• 15 October: Ai303 – Vibe Coding Applications
• 22 October: Ai304 – Agent Harnesses
• 29 October: Ai305 – S.C.O.P.E. Agent Tasks
• 5 November: Ai306 – Automate Your Workflows
• 12 November: Ai307 – Generate System Prompts
• 19 November: Ai308 – Evaluate Agent Performance

These 8 workshops will be held on Thursday mornings, 10am-11:30, at the new EPIC Exchange.

During this week's Christchurch AI Meetup, the Head of EPIC Innovation (our incredible venue in Christchurch) announced the EPIC Exchange, a collaborative coworking space focused on cool people doing cool things with AI.

I am going to be one of the Founding Members, and for my first 12 colleagues, they will get free access to the AI Agent Accelerator, an 8 week workshop sprint starting on 1 October.

If you don't want to join the EPIC Exchange, you can still enroll in the upcoming 8-workshops series for $350 NZD.

If you're not in Christchurch, but you'd like to join a webinar sprint on these 300-level topics, you can indicate your interest by clicking here, and I will follow-up to find times and dates that work for interested attendees.

📰 New AI News This Week

• The Wall Street Journal published an exclusive interview with Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who quit after 6 weeks because of AI Doomerism, going viral with a tweet from a previously unknown account
• Parker Thayer claims this is part of a well-funded PR operation, aimed at giving US frontier labs regulatory approval and banning open models
• Kevin Bass calls for a Congressional investigation into Anthropic and METR's finances, to clarify if they are 'third party evaluators'

👓 What I’m Reading

• ​We Must Pace the Frontier by Dario Amodei - "The current models are an almost endless gold mine of insight into both how to build AI well and what can sometimes go wrong with it if it isn’t built well. I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong."
• ​open the frontier by Jack Dorsey - "forcing someone to withhold a general-purpose model for safety reasons is a last resort. i would support it only with independently reviewable evidence that release materially increases a risk of catastrophic harm that narrower measures cannot adequately address."
• ​P(doom) calculation by Hunter Ash - "Doomer arguments are an illusion of rigor. You can string together a cause-and-effect story and attach vibed numbers and reach any conclusion you want. I’m not saying people don’t really believe their stories, but they are still just stories."
• ​What if AGI is already here, and it's made of... children? by Pascio - "In biology, there's a specific name for 'slight reinterpretation across generations of self-replicating entities.' We call that mutation. And mutation, combined with selection pressure, is... well, the very engine that produced every single intelligent thing on this planet today."

Upcoming Events:

Free webinar for members of the AI Coaching Academy:

Friday, September 18 at 10:00 AM GMT+12 Human-First AI: Find the Work that Matters Most AI won’t replace you. But someone who learns how to use it—without losing their humanity—might. In this reflective, hands-on session, Caelan Huntress shows how to use Generative AI to amplify your creativity, not replace it. You’ll learn to map your workflow to a five-step creative cycle—Collect, Sort, Craft, Polish, Publish—and discover which... RSVP

Premium webinar for members of the AI Campus:

Friday, September 25 at 11:00 AM GMT+12 Ai206 - AI for Creativity Generate New Ideas Use AI as a creative collaborator. This session helps you break through creative blocks, explore new directions, and accelerate ideation across writing, design, and problem-solving. Generate and expand ideas with AI co-creation tools. Explore alternative perspectives and creative directions. Accelerate brainstorming and... RSVP

Premium mastermind for members of the AI Seminar:

Friday, September 18 at 12:00 PM GMT+12 AI Mastermind Weekly accountability meeting. Come prepared to share your: WINS - what were your wins with AI this week? CHALLENGES - where did AI go wrong? COMMITMENTS - what will you be working on this week? RSVP

Keep on growing!

- Caelan Huntress ​[email protected]​ ​https://ai-coaching.academy/​

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