Just tell Claude Code your problem. That's how I started. I was like, look, I have a lot of newsletter emails. I read a lot of news sources. So, what do I do with all of this? Give me a workflow that, you know, sorts all this out. So, it said like, yeah, I'll give you a slash news skill. All you have to do is run /news and it'll create the digest for you. I'm like, yeah, yeah, awesome. Do that.
Hello listeners and welcome to another Semi Doped podcast. I'm Austin Lyons of Chipstrat and with me is Vik Sekar from Vik's Newsletter. Today we're going to talk about agents. So the framing for this is I feel like 2026 is actually going to be the year of agents. I think even as far back as 2024, there started to be some marketing speak where lots of companies said agent AI is all the rage and it's the thing and everyone should get on the bandwagon. And I think a lot of that was very aspirational and visionary, but it feels like now, as we'll get into with things like Claude Code, Claudebot, and so on, I'm actually seeing lots of people tinkering with agents. So, more than just marketing on a PowerPoint, but I'm actually seeing people play with this stuff. So I thought Vik and I we could kick off the conversation chatting about agents and then we will get into like what are some of the implications for CPUs, for GPUs and so on from an infrastructure perspective. So, okay, enough of an intro. Vik, let's start with you. Agents, what's top of mind for you?
Yeah, so the agent thing has become quite a revolution on X. Like, everybody has declared that it's over and now the age of agents is upon us. And also, I'm not sure what we should call this tool that is now this great agent that everybody's talking about because it started off as Claudebot, but then Claude decided it sounds too similar to their product and then they changed it to Moltbot and then now it's again changed to OpenClaw. I think this is what the final product is going to be called. So maybe we should refer to it as like OpenClaw so that this podcast makes some sense even like a few months down the line.
Yes, totally. Okay, we'll call it OpenClaw today. We'll see what if it changes.
Yeah. So this I saw this really funny YouTube video. He's a software programmer. I've seen his YouTube video for years and he calls himself the primogen. So, you know, if anybody's watching this, you should go and like pause this for a moment and see his Claude Code. Not his Claude Code, his OpenClaw video that he has. It's like really funny. But essentially, it's just like all these agents are like doing random things like it went and lost money on the crypto market and then posted on LinkedIn, I lost $1,600 in the crypto market and here's what I learned.
So, it's ridiculous. So, this kind of stuff is like really hilarious. The last week has been awesome. Just simply awesome in the world of technology and LLMs and AI.
That's good. It's so like LinkedIn clickbait type sounding, you know, like I did a thing and now I'm an expert. Let me tell you about it. That it's like almost mockery. It's hilarious.
Yeah. And it was all posted on this like Reddit equivalent for agents called Moltbook. So these like agents go and they post on Moltbook like humans do like they're writing a LinkedIn post. It's just a mess. I'm like why are we spending all this infrastructure in GPUs and burning down a few rainforests so agents can like get on social media like as if it weren't bad enough for humans.
Right. Totally. Yes. The experimental stage, we'll say that.
Yes indeed indeed. So let's start with Claude Code which when I think of like agentic AI coding I think of Claude Code. Tell me are you using Claude Code? How are you using it?
Yeah so the thing is with Claude Code for the longest time I never gave it a whirl because I don't do programming for a living and so I was like what I mean I guess it's a coding tool whatever I don't need it because I'm not coding anything. And I know programmers have been using it for a long time and doing it's been doing a lot of good stuff for them. So I was like I don't know I never use it. But then recently I saw videos of stuff and people talking about how Claude Code is so much more than just coding and then people use it for other things. And the creator of Claude Code himself said this on an interview. So I was like okay maybe now is the time to do this and I'm not scared away by like a Linux terminal or whatever. I'm okay with terminal. So I was like, fine, let's fire this up. It's pretty easy. So all I did was like, you know, installed Claude Code based on the instructions on the website. It works right off the bat. So it's on my Mac, you know, I installed it on my Mac terminal and I use it on that. So it's pretty neat actually. So I have the $20 subscription and I've been using it fairly extensively even based on that. At one point I like got locked out of Claude Opus. And I've been using Opus the whole time. I could have used Haiku or Sonnet. I didn't. I was like I just want the best model. Let's see how much it goes. So almost for a week's worth of work for my use case, I think the $20 was enough, right? So I got some use of it. Like I've been starting to create some skills and like running it and helping it do some of my research. It gives me information quickly. So yeah, it's pretty cool.
Okay, say more about how you're using it and which let me pause really quick and say that it's you point out like a funny like branding problem. It's like called Claude Code. So you're just like ah I'm not coding so I don't need this thing and they're it's kind of like no no no wait it can do more which I know that Anthropic has kind of tried to get past that with Claude Cowork I think it's called putting into the GUI where you know normal people live let's say you know and giving it a lot of the same tools have you and so I guess another question too so tell me more about how you use Claude Code but have you thought about also using that in Claude Cowork or do you just stick with Claude Code because Do you like the terminal command line feel versus a GUI?
I'm okay with the command line feel actually. I like it. So I actually use that. The cowork aspect of it I have not yet gotten into because a lot of the files that I work with at least for the newsletter and stuff is on Google Workspace and Google Drive. So I don't really need to access local files as much. But I can see if like cowork you know if you give it some control over your computer you know it could reorganize files on your computer this and that kind of stuff. But that being said I really don't like giving machines control over my computer. I just... Because you know this thing is watching me. I feel like I'm being watched and I have my password manager which has like a master code and like everything in my life is past that. Totally. I'm like, I'm not going to type anything while my agents are watching me.
Yeah, totally. I mean, think about it. If you hired interns to offload work, you're not going to let them use your computer, right? You're going to give them their own computer.
Yeah. Yeah. Claude Code isn't running, you know, it's within the terminal window that I'm using it, but it doesn't have general access to my computer. If I kill the terminal session, it's out, right? Like now no more.
So for you it's almost like a sandbox thing too. It's like hey it just lives in the terminal. It can't see everything. It does its thing there and then I can kill it when I'm done.
Yeah. So the way I'm using it is actually I have hooked it up with a Google Drive MCP server. So I run that and on a local Docker container on my Mac. So you can download Docker for desktop. I think it's there for Windows, Mac or whatever it is. And then you can get the Google MCP container from the Docker registry and you can just like run it. And what that does is it creates a link between the Google Drive on you know Google server and your local Claude Code session and MCP if people haven't heard about is model context protocol. So it's kind of like an API for LLMs that you can like plug into. So with this thing, I can actually look at my emails. I can look at my files on Google Drive and I can look at my calendar. So I can ask Claude Code, tell me what my week looks like. It'll look at my calendar and give me an, you know, something like that. I could go look at it, you know, whatever. But I could also never leave Terminal and be like, hey Claude, you know, can you add this appointment at this time? And I don't have to switch windows at all, right? So it just goes and adds a...
Okay, interesting. So yeah, I was going to ask like, oh, why are you connecting to Google Drive when you could just put files locally, but it's not just Google Drive, but you're accessing your calendar and your Gmail. So that's pretty awesome.
Yeah. So that's a very good point. Actually one thing that I ran out of tokens doing is trying to put the files that Claude Code creates like let's say I ask it to research something for me and create a report or something just so that I can read it and understand all the news of the week. I have a skill like that. But then what it does is it spends all this token authenticating with the MCP and I have to copy paste this thing into a browser and I have to click okay there. Then I was like, oh man, I'm just like dumb. Like Austin figured it out in like 1 second. I should just save it to my local Google Drive folder and then that will sync. So that's then I asked Claude Code like, hey Claude Code, don't sync it to the online version. Here is the folder locally. Just put it there and it'll sync on its own. So it does it like it then takes care of the changes, right?
Nice. Yes. Good. Good. So you mentioned you've got like a skill for reading the news or summarizing.
Yeah. Yeah. So what I told it is like I have all these Substack publications that come through. By the way, when I say this, people are going to do this to our publications. So it's probably not a good thing, but it helps, you know, it helps. The reason it helps is that I just want to get a sense of what the article covers without having to open all of the Substack publication emails I get and then have a quick summary of what is in there and then I can go and read the whole thing if I find that it's relevant or what because I store it on a Google doc or a Google file drive all these news summaries it now becomes searchable because Substack search is so terrible. So if I just go and ask Claude, hey, look in my news folder and tell me the substack that I remember seeing sometime in the last couple of weeks that spoke about this particular thing and it will surface it for me and there is the you know it short summaries there too and now I can go read the original thing. So it's kind of a note taking thing. So what I asked Claude Code to do was I have all the Substack emails coming into my Gmail folder labeled like newsletter and then I asked it to go read all the emails tagged newsletter and then it automatically decided to tag them as newsletter processed you know and it tags it another tag yeah it says like I'm going to tag it process because if I do this next time I will not you know resurface this because it's already summarized for you, right? So, it's very clever that way. And it said like, look, I'm going to put this newsletter process tag as hidden in your Gmail so that you don't always see it because not relevant really. So, it created a new tag label and hid it. It's very beautiful. It makes really good choices.
Yeah, it's really thinking deeply for you. Okay. Interesting. So, it's reading your email to get access to all your Substack, which is good because I was thinking like, oh, do you have it authenticated to Substack? How does this work? Technically, it can only read the entire email. So, for all of the Substack newsletters that are too long and get truncated, it's obviously going to only read what's in the email, but then it's even cleaning up after itself for you and tagging it as processed and hiding it. That's pretty amazing.
Yeah, it's pretty great. And now the thing that you mentioned about authentication is interesting. This is kind of unsafe what I'm doing here. But I have certain new subscriptions that I pay for and those things I just gave Claude Code like the login and password and be like log in on the website and then get me all the information on the paid articles because you know DigiTimes is one example right because if you go to DigiTimes and you don't have a pay subscription a lot of the articles are just completely paywalled like there's not even a single sentence over there so this thing goes logs in and then reads... And then summarizes it for me. It works great. Yeah. And I told it like what I'm interested in too because I don't want all kinds of news articles. So I said, hey, in the following areas like I like photonics, I like memory. I like interconnects. Whatever that I think like semiconductor like capex like semicap stuff ASML that kind of news foundry stuff. So it made it, you know, you can tell it like here are the topics I'm interested in and then it goes and creates its own files and keeps it all organized and deletes lines and adds lines whatever and keeps it all like great. Yeah. So it only surfaces the kind of information I want, not everything because then it becomes useless, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so is it writing all these summaries locally? It's like a markdown file or something.
Yes, exactly. It writes it in a markdown file on my local Google Drive folder which is which I read with VS Code. Maybe I should find a better markdown here but I just read it in VS Code. But you know if you go to Google Drive it doesn't maybe I don't know there's like a plugin I try to install that reads markdown but it's just cumbersome because it's not a Google doc file and you can open a markdown file as a Google doc file but it's just too much work. I mean it's already on my computer. But I just like open it and I'm okay.
Totally. Yeah. I use some app locally called Bear, I think, to view markdown. But hey, maybe agents will drive markdown to get better support in like Google and whatnot. Become a first class citizen if you will.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's fine. And then I told it like one, you know, all these like small optimizations I did later because I was like it tries to go through the it creates the entire digest and then it realizes it can't connect to the Google MCP server and then it's like I don't know like it's just hanging out and did write any files and so I told it next time make sure you can authenticate first before you start doing anything. If nothing happens let me know. I'll fix the authentication then you can go read my substack emails you know so I save tokens otherwise I like I just waste time with token like thinking through all this stuff and then it can't write the file you know.
Totally totally so it's both a genius but also can't think for itself and you have to tell it like hey you're optimizing for tokens here.
Yeah sometimes it's really smart sometimes it's like ah why didn't you do the obvious thing but for somebody who's thinking of like doing this kind of stuff I would not even recommend like going through any guide just ask just tell Claude Code your problem that's how I started I was like look I have a lot of newsletter emails I read a lot of news sources so what do I do with all of this give me a workflow that you know sorts all this out so it said like yeah I'll give you a slash news skill all you have to do is run slash news and it'll create a digest for you I'm like yeah yeah awesome do that.
Nice amazing that's pretty awesome. It's interesting because to you to generally today or yesterday it used to be you know anytime you want to start on something you like look for the tutorial and you hope someone wrote a good tutorial otherwise you're fumbling around and now you can just ask Claude and let it essentially guide you.
Yeah having been trained on all sorts of previous tutorials it's probably a good teacher at how to walk through and do this stuff. Yeah I also created a couple of other skills I said like I have a slash topic skill so what it does is it looks through all my news articles and looks at all the stuff I've written and if there's any possible extensions so it gives me a few suggestions like hey you should look at this look at this has happened in the news you kind of looked at your newsletter because it can go read at least the article top you know whatever is before the paywall on my you know newsletter itself on substack right that part is open so it goes and reads substack and it reads the news folder on my Google drive and tries to form some links and stuff like that playing with that it's not really useful in a sense because it's very it gives me very obtuse ideas. I don't know. So maybe I have to work on this a little bit. It's not as good as I would like it to be.
Gotcha. And how do you decide how much time to kind of sink into this and if it's worth it?
Yeah, that's a good point. I have spent time on these kinds of things and it goes nowhere. Like in the initial GPT days I tried creating various like what was it called? It is like a skill but it's like your own sub-GPT so to speak. Yeah, I tried making those but then you know I couldn't keep them up because each one had a system level instruction and then it didn't evolve with my style or anything like that. So here I like this because it's like an all-in-one thing and I improve it as I go. Like I don't spend too much time on it. Like if I'm doing something and it's coming up that I'm doing the same thing a few times and I ask Claude Code to go make that a skill or something and then it doesn't maybe do a great job of it which is fine because at least it got the job done for now and later on I'll kind of add skills or tweak the skill and all of it happens like I'm telling like telling you you know like oh you know I don't like this do that you know change this change that so it goes and fixes it. Yeah.
Yeah. So because you've been tinkering from the early days of making like custom GPTs or whatever they called it to now with Claude Code and it sounds like now you feel like you can talk to it more in natural language and it's mostly helpful and sometimes it burns tokens but generally speaking you can actually start to like automate some workflows. Do you feel like we're starting it back to the year of agents theme? I mean, do you feel like we're starting to get closer to a place where people who want either are less tech-savvy or don't want to invest so much time tinkering, you think we're getting to a place where they can actually start to create agents and tool around and experiment and find value?
