Hey there 👋

Welcome to this installment of Pixel Perfect Picks. Here I'm sharing something that I heard, read, and saw. You can subscribe to this newsletter here. I'm additionally publishing a more extended essay about software development, design, and freelancing every month.

xAI’s Grok Bot is an unusually concrete vision of what “a team of agents” could mean: agents with their own computers, working across the same apps a person uses. The launch page is full of deliberately mundane examples—CRM updates, invoice processing, reproducing bugs—and that’s what makes it interesting. The product framing is less about asking an AI to do a task and more about handing work to a persistent, specialised colleague. Still early beta, but a compelling interface for thinking about autonomous work.

How Compaction Works in Pi is a clear explanation of a mechanism that quietly determines whether a long agent session stays useful. It walks through how a conversation grows through messages and tool calls, then shows what gets retained and what gets summarised once context becomes scarce. The useful framing is compaction as a handoff briefing, not an attempt to preserve everything. Context windows may be getting larger, but deciding what deserves to survive still feels like a core design problem.

In Why Agentic Systems Need Ontologies, Frank Coyle makes the case that instructions alone cannot reliably constrain an agent operating in a messy world. His proposed missing layer is an ontology: explicit concepts, relationships, and rules that let an agent reason over something more stable than prose. It is a useful counterweight to the prevailing “just give it more tools” approach. The 21-minute talk is especially relevant if you have ever watched an agent make a technically valid but semantically absurd move.

PS: I'll be off in Spain next week to enjoy the beach and waves 🇪🇸 See you in 2 weeks again!

Keep Creating Awesome Stuff ✌️

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-Marvin