Working with AI agents is turning every IC into a team manager. Yesterday, you were coding. Today? You're delegating tasks, reviewing outputs, debugging reasoning loops, and sweating your monthly token budget. Hate to break it to you, but your AI team has notes about this... and you aren't listening. This talk is about giving your agents a complaint box. I'll walk through the design of a strategy called Wildcard. Wildcard is a flexible, amorphous tool your agents can call when they are stuck to explain what they need. I'll give some solid examples of how Wildcard leveled up the agents that power Coolhand Labs by surfacing issues in real time, helping us cut down on loops, token burn, and bad practices. We will implement the tool from scratch in a sample codebase, handle some agentic feedback in real time, and cover a few protips for getting the most out of Wildcard in your agent team. Giving you strategies to coax your agents into providing unfiltered feedback is included in the talk. Processing that feedback emotionally will be on you.
Michael Carroll is the founder of Coolhand Labs, which automatically improves AI agents from human & synthetic feedback. Previously, he built RubiconMD (acquired by Oak Street Health) and served as VP of Engineering and Strategic Projects at Teladoc Health, the world's largest telemedicine provider. Michael also publishes The Everything Engineer, a newsletter about the transition from IC engineering to managing a team of AI agents. When he's not reading his agents' complaints, he's merging the PRs that will generate a fresh batch of them.
