Mousepower: agents that can’t be measured, can’t be managed.
Official Schedule Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-30 · 12:05pm-12:25pm
- Track/room: Design Engineering · Track 6
- Speaker(s): Maximillian Piras
- Session type/status: session · confirmed
Official Description
Agents have a measurement problem, which makes them impossible to efficiently manage. You’ve likely
heard many say execution is now cheap, but judgement is the new bottleneck. This is because our
evaluation frameworks weren’t designed for systems that tirelessly output in parallel. The canary in
the coal mine is code generation becoming largely solved at the expense of breaking code review. As
agents reverberate across all knowledge work, the same fracture will spread to artifacts, actions, &
decisions. Yet without a scalable quality measure, we can’t ascend to a higher level of abstraction
because we won’t trust the foundation below. So how do we design measurements that are efficient,
intuitive, & trustworthy? Past paradigm shifts offer inspiration, such as James Watt not just
building a better engine but also inventing horsepower to map it onto existing mental models. We
need an equivalent quantification to communicate the “mousepower” of agents. Information theory
gives us the starting point: concepts like entropy, ergodic processes, and Hamiltonian problems
point us toward the most tractable trajectories — easier to verify than they are to solve.
Related YouTube Video
The Bitter Layout or: How I Learned to Love the Model Picker — Maximillian Piras, Yutori (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).
Transcript Status
Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.
People
Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.
Supporting Slides
- youtube BZtD0yYAgCQ slides — extracted from the related public AI Engineer video.
Slide Evidence
- Slide-only cropped deck: youtube BZtD0yYAgCQ dense slides (2 viable slide images).
- Related slide/OCR pages:
- youtube BZtD0yYAgCQ dense slides
- youtube BZtD0yYAgCQ reconstructed slides
- youtube BZtD0yYAgCQ slides
- Slide-derived terms:
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