Daily Grind July 11, 2025: AI Agent App Store, The Experimentation Machine, and Building Self-Agency
Welcome to Tech's morning newsletter, featuring one headline, one page of a great book, and one question to ponder
Good morning, and happy Friday!
We’re wrapping up the first FULL week of The Daily Grind and I’ve been having a blast. I can’t thank you enough for reading.
Before we get into the headlines, if you have been following along this week, I have one question for you… WHY?
Seriously, I’d like to know what keeps you opening this newsletter every day, and how I can make it even better for you.
Today we are talking all things AGENTS: A new AI Agent Marketplace, a great example of Agents in action, and cultivating our SELF-Agency in the age of AI.
Enjoy!
📰 One Startup Headline: Amazon and Anthropic Teaming Up for AI Agent Marketplace
Is this the new App Store?
Next week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launching an AI Agent Marketplace in partnership with Anthropic, the makers of Claude.
TechCrunch is reporting the new marketplace will allow AI startups to submit their agents and earn revenue from users. AWS and Anthropic will take a cut of each sale, just like Apple’s App Store does for its apps.
This is not the first AI Agent App Store, but could it be the most significant?
The Door is Wide Open for a Truly Functional Agent Marketplace
Earlier this year, Google Cloud introduced a dedicated section in its Marketplace for AI Agent tools, but it leaves a lot to be desired. It currently has just 140 agents, and 47 of them were built by Deloitte:
Plus, the Agent apps in the Google Cloud Marketplace aren’t one-click downloads like the Apple App Store.
When you click on an app, you’re prompted to “Contact Sales” or “Sign Up with Partner.” In other words, it’s more of a Agent directory than a real marketplace.
Microsoft also announced the launch of an Agent Store earlier this year, but all I can find are blog posts and landing pages about the launch, not the store itself.
Saleforce’s AppExchange Marketplace seems to have the largest and most functional Agent App Store, but these apps only work on the Salesforce platform.
So the door is wide open for a real, truly useful and functional Agent App Store. Will this AWS/Anthropic collab be the answer?
What are AI Agents, exactly?
If you’re wondering, you’re not alone. We have One Great Page explaining the Agentic Revolution below.
🔗 A Few Good Links
Here are some other stories worth exploring:
NYT: Denmark giving citizens ability to copyright likeness to fight against deepfakes
Reuters: OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome
Plus, a follow up on Thursday’s story about Solar energy:
📚 One Page: The Experimentation Machine by Jeffrey J. Bussgang
What are AI agents, and more importantly, what do they do?
Harvard Business School Professor and VC Jeff Bussgang shares a great example in his book, The Experimentation Machine: Finding Product-Market Fit in the Age of AI.
Agentic AI: The Next Frontier is Here
Studies have found that AI copilots make engineers about 26 percent more productive. AI agents have the power to make us 100 times more productive.
Agentic AI represents the shift from copilot to full decisioning and action-taking. We will have general use AI agents for our day-to-day lives (e.g., “Call me an Uber to take me to the airport”) and also specialized agents designed to complete specific tasks, series of tasks, or to work on teams with other AI agents.
Agent teams have the greatest potential impact on the way startups scale. Imagine a team of specialized agents working together to move a software project from ideation, through development, through testing, and into production. Hard to imagine? This is exactly what startup Blitzy.AI is doing today to build enterprise software in one-tenth the time.
“Software development today is AI-supported, where you have engineers using copilots,” said Siddhant Pardeshi, co-founder and CTO of Blitzy. “But what if you could flip that and have AI do most of the work, and only have the humans f ill in and do the rest?”
Blitzy’s vision is a world where all B2B software is custom- built to the exact specifications of the customer. This world is not as far off as you might think. Today, 80 percent of all commercial software is built on open-source technology. That means AI has seen and ingested it all as training data. AI models have already learned how to build good software, they just need the agency to do the job.
That’s what Blitzy is trying to do. The startup recently won a contract for an enterprise software project that required 30,000 lines of code and would normally take six months to build. They completed the project in just six days with one senior engineer (their next goal is to complete projects like this with a junior engineer).
Their process is cutting-edge, but it’s a harbinger of things soon to be available to the masses. The key is to think about breaking down complex tasks into smaller, specialized steps that can be handled by different agents while maintaining human oversight for quality control and final refinement. Here is an overview of how Blitzy’s AI agent system builds software:
Step 1: A specialized agent takes the initial product vision and concept, and translates it into a product requirements document (PRD). This is the roadmap for all subsequent development.
Step 2: A second agent ingests the PRD and expands it into detailed technical requirements.
Step 3: A third agent converts the technical requirements into technical specifications. This is the step that senior engineers would traditionally take on. The specs are then reviewed and finalized by human engineers.
Step 4: A fourth agent translates specifications into system architecture. It maps out how different components of the software will work together and handles complex system dependencies and integrations.
Step 5: Finally, thousands of coding agents (up to 3,000) work collaboratively to build the software. Each agent handles a specific portion of the codebase. Together they can generate 30,000–50,000 lines of code in just a few hours. This is how Blitzy overcomes the token limit of individual AI models (which, as of this writing, is 8,000 tokens or approximately 6,000 words for ChatGPT).
The entire development process currently takes about twelve hours. Ten of those hours are spent on “thinking” through the first four steps. Only the final two hours are spent actually coding. Right now, Blitzy promises to create about 80 percent of a final project, leaving the final 20 percent for human engineers.
Blitzy is not alone; Replit and Codeium are startups with similar platforms growing in popularity. We are still in the early innings of the Agentic Revolution.
Want to read more about building startups with AI?
❓ One Question: If you had 10x more agency, what would you do?
AI agents are all the buzz right now, but so is agency. Agency is our ability—and the trust in our ability—to get things done. To make changes we want to see. To build the life we want.
One question I saw on Twitter months ago still haunts me (in a good way):
“If I had 10x the agency I have, what would I do?”
(Sorry, I had to add proper capitalization and grammar. I’m not a Gen Zer.)
I find this question is very helpful for getting unstuck.
Another example (from my generation) is, “What would I do if I knew I could not fail?”
If you reflect or journal on this question this morning, please share!
🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback
That’s if for the first FULL week of The Daily Grind!
I am still finding my voice and style in this newsletter, so in addition to the poll below, I’d love to know:
Which section do you look forward to most?
Which section do you skip?
Any ideas on how to make this the best version of “Tech’s Morning Newsletter?”
I love the One Question. I actually used the questions about energy when mentoring this week! Sometimes the one page is hard for me to read but I’m an old nerd, not a true techie!