Short answer: David Petrou says Wheelie is for solopreneurs, prosumers and CTOs of small to medium companies exhausted by running many agents. It decomposes a problem, picks the number of agents and routes questions to the right developer, even across time zones.
Watch this answer from Episode 51 (starts at 9:04) · Episode 51 notes and transcript
From Episode 51: It Ships While You Sleep. The AI Agent OS a Former Google Engineer Built After Leaving Google., starting at 9:04.
Jordan Metzner [9:04]: Obviously, like you mentioned, late last year, the LLMs and kind Of AI in general changed in its ability to kinda do a step function quality improvement. And then, obviously, we've Seen just insane velocity since then. But, yeah, tell us now, obviously, there's a lot of coding tools and agents and harnesses and all different things on the market even by different phrases or names. But tell us a little bit about Wheelie, who's using it, or, like, kind of who's the archetype of who would be using it.
David Petrou [9:29]: So so, I mean, the archetype would be solopreneur, if that's the term, also prosumer, CTO of a small company, up to medium size. Really, you can think of it like, okay. If you've done agentic coding in a harness, you kinda know what the experience is like. You have a terminal open. You're doing the work. You have various degrees of autonomy. It started where you type something. You'd wait thirty seconds. You get an answer, you type something back. Now it's going on for, like, longer, goal oriented stretches. And then you get to a point where you realize, wow, I can open up two of these windows. Now you have two agents functioning at the same time, and then you can go to four and so on. And then what you realize as a developer is, you're starting to get very exhausted. You're starting to have a lot of trouble holding in your mind all the state that's going on. A lot of companies now are experimenting with sub agents and plan mode and stuff like this, but they all suffer a number of problems. And just to tie in our experience with social AI into the story of Wheelie, human attention is the most precious resource that's out there. Token costs are continuing to go down, but what's not improving is the availability of, the human attention span. And so what we've seen is that organizations, whether big or small, the more they adopt agentic coding, the more they struggle with problems of communication, say amongst a team. We're seeing situations where, there could be a production failure, and people on the team, they just don't even bother to talk to others on the team to give, like, a proper postmortem, like, what happened?
David Petrou [11:29]: How did the fix go? Because it's faster just to make the fix and roll forward. Right? So what Wheelie is trying to solve is figure out how to get the right information to the right developers at the right time so that you're not exhausted and so that the money that you're spending on these tokens is being maximally used. So it's a very opinionated platform, and I think that you're right, Jordan, that this space there's a lot of players in this space, and different companies are take taking different views on how to do things. By opinionated, the approach that we're taking at Wheelie is that a lot of the systems that have been built up to now have been built for the shape of human attention. Think about Git. Think about GitHub. If you were to design source control from scratch in an agent first world, you wouldn't do it that way. We see scaling issues all over the place in the stack. Okay. You have a problem. You state the problem. Wheelie decomposes it, figures out the right number of agents, figures out where they should run, figures out when to interrupt you if it has a question. It knows your habit.
David Petrou [12:51]: It knows what time zone you're in. It knows what time zone your coworkers are in. So if there is a production issue and you're off for the night, it could contact someone in a different time zone that might still be awake. So it's this type of optimization of communication flow that Wheelie provides. We are early in this, adventure. So at the moment, we are a wait list that you can sign up, and we take people off the wait list, and we hold your hand through different parts, and we ask exactly what's most important to you. We refine our product based on that. But at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is provide maximum value on a per token basis for doing agentic coding, and that's why we call it an agentic development operating system.
