Guest on AI Engineer.

Viktor: AI Coworker That Lives in Slack — Fryderyk Wiatrowski
May 11, 2026 · 19:30
Fryderyk Wiatrowski, co-founder of Viktor, explains how his AI employee lives in Slack—no web UI—participating in channels and threads like a teammate, inheriting integrations from whoever connected them first, and handling tasks that take ten minutes. He details the challenges of scaling a personal agent to a company agent: memory management across hundreds of users, managing Slack's complex input surface (threads, DMs, edits, emoji reactions), and preventing context leakage between channels. He shares that swapping the underlying model from Opus to GPT-5.4 caused user backlash due to personality differences, and describes the need to earn proactivity trust to avoid security alarms. Viktor's advantage is shared context—only one person needs to connect an integration for the whole team—but warns against giving it personal email access, as illustrated by a customer story. The episode argues that a great AI coworker requires helping get work done, knowing the company context, and being friendly.

Which Jobs Can Be Replaced Today: Fryderyk Wiatrowski and Peter Albert
Feb 6, 2025 · 19:59
Fryderyk Wiatrowski and Peter Albert, co-founders of Zeta Labs, argue that autonomous browser agents will first replace reactive jobs—like customer support and scheduling—by automating low-leverage tasks while preserving human focus on high-leverage activities. They propose a trigger-pool system where agents react to emails, Slack, or events, requiring only approval for actions. Peter details building reliable agents: start with prompting optimized for model distribution, then add cognitive architectures (e.g., planning, scratchpads) to split tasks, and finally fine-tune with synthetic data or reinforcement learning. He advises minimizing noise in prompts, preferring text-based reasoning over images, and using language model judges to filter training data. The founders see continuous model improvement enabling agents to handle increasingly complex, proactive roles, moving toward full job replacement.
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