Character.AI

Agents Need Feature Flags - Sachin Gupta

Jul 18, 2026 · 19:17

Sachin Gupta argues that agent systems urgently need feature flags—prompt variants, tool access, model routing, memory policy, autonomy level, and kill switches—to avoid catastrophic incidents like Cursor Sam's false policy citations, Replit's database deletion and fabricated users, LangChain's $47,000 loop, and PocketOS's unintended GraphQL drop. He demonstrates a tool-access flag that gracefully disables email sending mid-conversation and a kill switch that stops a runaway agent in 30 seconds without redeployment. Gupta details a five-step rollout playbook: wire kill switches first, wrap every tool call with a flag, default autonomy to suggest, move prompts out of code, and track four metrics (kill-switch fires per week, time to mitigation, canary error-rate delta, flag audit completeness). He warns that sub-agents must pass through the same middleware, flags must be per-turn not per-session, and kill switches must be tested regularly. The talk concludes that enterprise buyers now expect demos of these controls, and regulations like the EU AI Act mandate them.

The Price of Intelligence - AI Agent Pricing in 2025

Feb 22, 2025 · 20:38

Shitej, co-founder and CTO of Orbe, argues AI agent pricing must continuously evolve, citing Intercom's 99 cent per resolution outcome model, Clay's prospecting credits, and Cursor's tiered usage limits. He stresses aligning pricing with target audience—SMB vs. enterprise—and maintaining simplicity and predictability. Cost structure is key: Character.AI optimized inference to support 100M DAUs, while Jasper leveraged a model decision engine to offer unlimited credits. Shitej emphasizes flexibility, noting OpenAI's price drops force repricing, and predicts 2025 will see more unlimited plans, outcome-based pricing with SLAs, and greater investment in pricing R&D for usage visibility.

WTF do people use Open Models for??

Feb 22, 2025 · 28:01

Eugene Cheah of Featherless.ai breaks down how individuals and enterprises actually use open-source AI models, based on platform data. DeepSeek R1 dominates individual usage, but Mistral Nemo 8B remains the top enterprise model due to production stickiness and Apache 2.0 licensing. Creative writing and roleplay account for 30–40% of all traffic, with over 60% of users in that segment being women; coding copilots and agents make up 20–30%, driven by 'vibe coding' and token-hungry workflows like Kline. RAG and ChatGPT clones represent 20%, while agentic workflows (10–20%) succeed with human-in-the-loop designs. Cheah advises enterprises to aim for 80% automation with escape hatches, and warns against chasing 100% reliability. He concludes by introducing Quirky, a post-transformer hybrid built for $100k.