Everyone complains that AI agents stop working when you close the lid on your laptop. I just told my Hermes agent to configure the laptop so it doesn’t sleep when I close the lid. I’ve done this on several laptops without issue.
The uncomfortable part of Hermes is that the same thing making it useful also makes it hard to trust. Most software fails generically, a personal agent fails differently. It can learn *your* wrong pattern.
It may learn that because you opened one briefing first, you care about that topic most. Because you replied quickly once, you want more of that kind of nudge. Because one week was chaotic, it starts treating an exception like a preference. That is the real product challenge here.
It's the limitation I like least. It pattern-matches on what you respond to, so one enthusiastic reply to a bad briefing and it doubles down. No unlearn command either. You edit the skill file or wipe the memory.
The Gemini number is the one I can't stop thinking about. 750 million users getting document generation for free while Microsoft charges $360/year for essentially the same capability, and only 3.3% of their base has paid for it. That's not a competitive gap. That's a pricing thesis falling apart in real time.
Microsoft built Copilot on the assumption that productivity AI is a premium feature people will pay a subscription for. Google just made it a free feature of a product people already use. The 3.3% adoption rate was already a warning signal. Now it's a ceiling, because the marginal user who hasn't paid $360 yet just got offered a free alternative from a company they already trust with their documents.
The Cursor SDK announcement is the other one that deserves more weight than a bullet point. Going from product to infrastructure is the move that separates tools from platforms. $2B ARR as an app is impressive. $2B ARR as infrastructure that other companies build on top of is a different asset class entirely. That's the same transition Stripe made when it stopped being a checkout button and started being the payments layer.
Especially as the free version only has to be good enough. Roughly 97% of that base has not paid, and the longer a free option sits next to them, the more the question of paying quietly settles itself.
Everyone complains that AI agents stop working when you close the lid on your laptop. I just told my Hermes agent to configure the laptop so it doesn’t sleep when I close the lid. I’ve done this on several laptops without issue.
Ha, nice. Asking the agent to fix its own environment is underrated. I'd still put it on a $5 VPS, but that's a clean fix for the laptop.
The uncomfortable part of Hermes is that the same thing making it useful also makes it hard to trust. Most software fails generically, a personal agent fails differently. It can learn *your* wrong pattern.
It may learn that because you opened one briefing first, you care about that topic most. Because you replied quickly once, you want more of that kind of nudge. Because one week was chaotic, it starts treating an exception like a preference. That is the real product challenge here.
It's the limitation I like least. It pattern-matches on what you respond to, so one enthusiastic reply to a bad briefing and it doubles down. No unlearn command either. You edit the skill file or wipe the memory.
The Gemini number is the one I can't stop thinking about. 750 million users getting document generation for free while Microsoft charges $360/year for essentially the same capability, and only 3.3% of their base has paid for it. That's not a competitive gap. That's a pricing thesis falling apart in real time.
Microsoft built Copilot on the assumption that productivity AI is a premium feature people will pay a subscription for. Google just made it a free feature of a product people already use. The 3.3% adoption rate was already a warning signal. Now it's a ceiling, because the marginal user who hasn't paid $360 yet just got offered a free alternative from a company they already trust with their documents.
The Cursor SDK announcement is the other one that deserves more weight than a bullet point. Going from product to infrastructure is the move that separates tools from platforms. $2B ARR as an app is impressive. $2B ARR as infrastructure that other companies build on top of is a different asset class entirely. That's the same transition Stripe made when it stopped being a checkout button and started being the payments layer.
3.3% of 450M M365 users paying is the number I'd be staring at if I ran Copilot. Then Gemini hands the same thing to 750M people for free.
Especially as the free version only has to be good enough. Roughly 97% of that base has not paid, and the longer a free option sits next to them, the more the question of paying quietly settles itself.