The Wrong Defaults: An AI Agent Manifesto - by Phan Phan

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The Wrong Defaults: An AI Agent Manifesto<br>The AI industry is building for itself. And enterprise is paying the price.<br>Phan Phan<br>Aug 12, 2026

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Do you see the similarities across AI agent interfaces that these companies give you? There are chat sessions, there are model selections, there are tone settings, then there are MCP connections, there are skills, there are memories. They are setting up the “industry standards” and now whoever is building a new AI agent for themselves or for their companies, they follow the same standard.<br>And whether you realize it or not, these standards suck, and I’m gonna tell you why.<br>Configurations are often just a polite way to ship uncertainty

You see, when engineers build a CLI with different flags or a product with different settings, they usually don’t know what the user wants, so they give them a choice, a setting. And with that, they nicely shift the “decision maker” role to you. So every time using the current standard AI chat interfaces, many questions raise inside your head:<br>Where did I discuss X?

Should I compact this conversation now since the context is almost full, or open a new conversation?

What other model should I use?

What connectors should I connect to?

And you have to make decision for each of them. This is you speaking engineering language.<br>One of the best first impressions with iOS (comparing with vs Android) is that iPhones are always ready-to-use . Sure, you have limited choices, you’re “locked in”, but the truth is for the majority of users, you don’t need that much customization for it to work. You just pick up the phone and use it, it just works, what could be more convenient?<br>Now, to be fair, both exist because there are people who want the freedom of choices, they want more configurations, making the world as beautiful as it is now. But, if you’re an enterprise trying to get hundreds or thousands of employees to adopt AI better, you must build the iPhone version. Because obviously it’s optimized for mass adoption . You don’t want to sacrifice the majority of users for the luxury of a few power users. And that is what I want to talk about today:<br>You need to break The Wrong Defaults .

Do the right things

I have been taught since I was little: if you believe you’re doing the right thing, even though everyone else says the other way, then trust your gut and do it. So here is my take.<br>If you look at the enterprise AI landscape right now – it’s all over the news by the way – you can tell that companies large and small are desperate for AI adoption as they’re afraid of being left behind. They buy licenses from the AI companies, then they build their own AI agents using the industry standards, also from those AI companies. They’re encouraging people to try the new AI tools. It’s a never-ending cycle. The only winners are those AI companies. And the end-users are the ones who suffer . But who cares if your company asks you to use or build such tools? I do.<br>One conversation is enough for the AI agent

The same way that you talk with your friends or your coworker: you have one long chat for each of them. You open the chat, and you start typing. That’s how it should work. That’s how it should be. Don’t be brainwashed by the standard and build a multi-session chat interface . If you are an AI agent builder and you cannot solve the context budget, or AI hallucination problem, that’s on you. Don’t put that on the users and expect them to “adopt” your tool.<br>Spoiler alert, you can do that by simply observing how human memory work, because our brain has a similar “context budget”, just much larger. We’re forgetting things too. Apply that judgement to your AI, you’ll find your own solutions.<br>Embed your AI agents right into your chat platform

Whether you’re using Slack or Teams or any other application at work, copying and pasting chats between the AI agents and those chat platforms is ridiculous . It’s an absolutely absurd standard.<br>Your chat platform already holds context - conversations with coworkers, decisions made in group chats, files shared, links exchanged. Why would you force the user to leave that context, open another tool, paste their question there, get a response, then copy/paste it back?<br>Now just imagine a world where your AI agent lives right there in the same chat. You talk to it the same way you talk to your coworker. Your coworker can see what the agent said. The agent can see what your coworker said. No context lost. No copy-paste. No switching tabs. Yeah, it’s sci-fi stuff - except it’s not.<br>One AI agent is enough

The AI industry wants you to build as many AI agents as possible . That’s how they make money. So they (highly recommend you read this very slowly) build platforms for your company to build platforms for its employees to build their specialized, personal assistant AI agents. And you play right into their hands. You burn...