r/ajvc

I've been thinking about Claude Code's tags recently.At first, I thought they were just a nice UX feature.Now I think they're pointing at something much bigger.

I don't think AI has an intelligence problem anymore.
I think it has an interface problem.

Today, every AI agent is locked inside an application.
Your coding agent lives in VS Code.
Your writing assistant lives in Docs.
Your support bot lives in Zendesk.
Your sales assistant lives in Salesforce.
Your design assistant lives in Figma.

The moment you leave that application, the agent effectively disappears.
We've accidentally recreated software silos, except this time for AI. The strange part is that the work isn't happening inside the application.

The work is happening wherever you're typing.
An email.
A Slack message.
A PR review.
A Notion page.
A comment.
A browser text box.
That's where the intent exists.

Yet every time we need AI, we leave that context, open another interface, rebuild context, get an answer, then come back. We keep treating AI as a destination instead of a capability.
The more I think about it, the more I feel agents shouldn't belong to applications at all.

They should belong to the user.

An agent shouldn't care whether I'm in Gmail, Slack, Notion, Figma, GitHub, or somewhere else.
It should simply be available the moment I need it.
Almost like mentioning a teammate.
@Legal
@Research
@Sales
@Finance
Not because @ is the important part.
Because it removes the idea that an agent belongs to one interface.
It becomes something you can invoke wherever work already exists.
Maybe this is where AI is headed.
Not bigger AI applications.
Not more copilots.
Just breaking AI agents free from the interfaces we've trapped them inside.
Curious if anyone else feels we're optimizing the intelligence of agents while ignoring the much bigger constraint, which is where they're allowed to exist.

This is my attempt to build a new paradigm for AI agents for any interface at OpenTags.

A few months ago I applied to ajvc. Got rejected.

I didn't take it badly. It was fair. The product wasn't ready and I knew it.

I followed up anyway. Just a short note saying thanks and that I was going to keep building. Genuinely didn't expect a reply.

Aviral replied. "Looking forward to it."

I stared at that for a while. Two words. Probably took him five seconds to type. But I couldn't stop thinking about what it would mean to actually show up after that, not with more promises, but with something real.

The problem was the product was a mess. The memory layer had edge cases I'd been ignoring. Payments were stuck in test mode. The API key flow broke for existing users. I'd been telling myself these were "minor issues" for two weeks.

I stopped telling myself that.

The next six weeks I fixed all of it. Properly, not patches. I ran 40 real test prompts and wrote down every result including the embarrassing ones. Worst case was 0% improvement on complex tasks and that number stayed in the report because hiding it would've felt like lying to myself more than anyone else.

The thing I keep coming back to: I would not have done any of this without that reply. Not because it was particularly encouraging. But because someone I respected said "looking forward to it" and I didn't want to find out what it felt like to waste that.

I don't know if Aviral remembers sending it. On his end it was probably nothing. On mine it was the difference between shipping something real and shipping something almost real.

Funny how that works.