ER Erik Rogne Subscribe

Nov 1, 2025

Erik’s Newsletter: Design for Agents, Delight for Humans

Issue #84

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🗓 Today at a Glance

Quote: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Reading: How Anthropic launches product
Podcast: Eric Schmidt on agents on All-In podcast
Tweet: “The value of CEOs is urgency.” — Cody Plofker
Idea: The Context Puller

💬 Quote I’m Pondering

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” — Eisenhower

Planning forces me to surface assumptions and pre-decide tradeoffs. Then I can throw away the plan and move faster when reality changes.

🧠 What I’m Thinking About

  • Tesla already won infotainment. Everyone else treats the screen like an accessory; Tesla treats it like the ONLY product. I’m using FSD ~95% of the time now (Shaan). It changes how I think about the car.

  • Agents are middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. Design for agents as users: stable IDs, forgiving APIs, clear state, fewer puzzles. (Great Eric Schmidt segment on All-In.)

  • The CEO job is urgency. Presumptive close reduces decision fatigue: “If I don’t hear otherwise, we ship to 5%.” (tweet)

  • Build outside the app. Ride-alongs beat dashboards. (Hiten)

  • Ephemeral vs. durable. Transactional features are fun to ship; durable systems compound trust. Do both on purpose.

  • Meta Ray-Ban displays. Curious what adoption looks like; chunky, but the price-to-magic ratio is finally interesting.

  • Sora: gimmick and spark. Might funnel to ads, yet it meaningfully expands my creative search space.

  • Pregnancy pouches. Healthy, shelf-stable mini-meals for the “always a little hungry” window.

  • No-DMs mode. A public intake form instead of DMs. Simple, scalable routing. (Anjney)

  • Headshots with AI. “Good enough” for most use cases; the delta is lighting and hair. (example)

  • Lounge chairs should mandate sunshades. Sun > screens.

🎧 Podcasts Worth Your Time

**Eric Schmidt on agents
**_//allin_

  • Agents will broker between tools, not “do everything.”

  • Design surfaces for agents (APIs, webhooks, stable state), then design stories for humans.

Become the Delight PM
//lennyspodcast

  • Treat “find the smile” as a roadmap constraint, not a nice-to-have.

  • Time-box delight (e.g., 10% capacity) so it survives prioritization.

  • Practical: run weekly “two-hour delight sprints” with a tiny PRD and a before/after clip.

Daniel Ek
//founders

  • “Big companies are not evil. They are really good at doing what made them successful in the first place.”

  • Useful lens: ask “what are we still good at that no longer maps to the next win?”

  • Shipping test: every project should have a visible user-facing improvement in 7 days.

🐦 Tweets That Made Me Stop and Think

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DoorDash Unveils Dot, the Delivery Robot Powered by its Autonomous Delivery Platform to Accelerate Local Commerce | DoorDash

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💡 Idea I Can’t Get Out of My Head

The Context Puller: an agent that pulls context from your tools (docs, chats, calendar, browser) into one queryable “/context” file

  • MVP: Chrome extension + email + calendar + docs; daily digest + API.

  • Why now: agents need shared memory; humans need less copy-paste.

  • Test: “Draft a project brief from last week’s artifacts.” If it’s 70% right, it’s working.