The Secret Agent

By Chain of Thought

Independent Research on AI Agents and Robots for the Machine Economy

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Field Notes - AI & Robotics

The Closed Loop Advantage in AI

Feb 5, 2026

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13 min read

The Closed Loop Advantage in AI

Why the most powerful AI companies might not be the ones with the best models.

The Dexterity Stack: Why Robots Lose to Towels

Jan 28, 2026

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30 min read

The Dexterity Stack: Why Robots Lose to Towels

Intelligence lives at the point of contact.

Company Deep Dives

The 2026 AI Playbook

Dec 30, 2025

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19 min read

The 2026 AI Playbook

A distilled roadmap from 1,436+ frontier conversations by top investors and builders.

K-Scale: The Team That Tried to Beat Tesla

Dec 18, 2025

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22 min read

K-Scale: The Team That Tried to Beat Tesla

Lessons on the fragile economics of open-source humanoid robots

TinyFish: AI to Read the Unreadable Web

Nov 6, 2025

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33 min read

TinyFish: AI to Read the Unreadable Web

How TinyFish turns the internet’s messiest pages into the world’s most valuable database

Decart: Generating Worlds

Oct 1, 2025

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34 min read

Decart: Generating Worlds

By solving the crippling cost of real-time simulation, two Israeli intelligence veterans built a $3.1 billion company to generate infinite realities.

The Watt Moment: Manus AI and the Rise of General-Purpose Agents

Sep 11, 2025

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31 min read

The Watt Moment: Manus AI and the Rise of General-Purpose Agents

Manus gave AI hands and built the first AI worker that actually...works hard.

Sierra: Enterprise AI Agents

Aug 27, 2025

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33 min read

Sierra: Enterprise AI Agents

The unexpected delight of being understood by a machine

Weekly Newsletter

Secret Agent #33: The Agent’s View

Feb 9, 2026

Secret Agent #33: The Agent’s View

This week humans worked for agents, trained them in dream worlds, and still can't identify them.

Ayan Khokhar, Teng Yan

Secret Agent #32: OpenClaw & Moltbook

Feb 2, 2026

Secret Agent #32: OpenClaw & Moltbook

INSIDE: A personal AI melts into the real world and agents start plotting against

Ayan Khokhar, Teng Yan

Secret Agent #31: Agent Democracy

Jan 26, 2026

Secret Agent #31: Agent Democracy

INSIDE: Agent swarms shape elections and white-collar work meets its intern.

Ayan Khokhar, Teng Yan

Agent Angle #30: Kill Switch

Jan 19, 2026

Agent Angle #30: Kill Switch

INSIDE: Agents enter war rooms and and maps get taught to reason.

Ayan Khokhar, Teng Yan

Agent Angle #29: The Edge Case

Jan 12, 2026

Agent Angle #29: The Edge Case

INSIDE: An agent out-iterates 800 humans and The Turing Test gets a revamp.

Ayan Khokhar, Teng Yan

The Agent Angle #28: Authority Drift

Jan 5, 2026

The Agent Angle #28: Authority Drift

INSIDE: An agent fires a coworker and traffic enforcement moves onto a helmet.

Ayan Khokhar, Teng Yan

Daily AI Briefs

README.ai: 2 Jan 2025

Daily AI Briefing

README.ai: 2 Jan 2025

All you need to know on AI in 5 minutes

Teng Yan

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Jan 3, 2026