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by trjordan 281 days ago
AI sloppiness of this blog post aside, it's a reasonable observation.

If you're thinking about how to integrate AI into your system, it's worth asking the question of why your system isn't just ChatGPT.

- Do you have unique data you can pass as context?

- Do you have APIs or actions that are awkward to teach to other systems via MCP?

- Do you have a unique viewpoint that you are writing into your system prompt?

- Do you have a way to structure stored information that's more valuable than freeform text memories?

- etc.

For instance, we [0] are writing an agent that helps you plan migrations. You can do this with ChatGPT, but it hugely benefits from (in descending order of uniqueness) access to

1) a structured memory that's a cross between Asana and the output of `grep` in a spreadsheet,

2) a bunch of best-practice instructions on how to prep your codebase for a migration, and

3) the AI code assistant-style tools like ls, find, bash, etc.

So yeah, we're writing at agent, not building a model. And I'm not worried about ChatGPT doing this, despite the fact that GPT5 is pretty good at it.

[0] https://tern.sh