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The OpenClaw mascot, a lobster, presides over a fleet of agents.<\/p>\n
Engineers manage agents now. So do scientists. So do the labs building AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cEngineering roles are becoming management roles where you manage AI agents.\u201d That is how Vinay Pinnaka, co-founder and CTO of the Y Combinator-backed<\/a> Silicon Valley fintech JustPaid<\/a>, describes what the past year has done to his job.<\/p>\n \u201cI built AI Gilfoyle,\u201d Pinnaka said, referring to Mike Judge\u2019s influential HBO comedy series, Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n In the show, Bertram Gilfoyle, after a promotion to VP of architecture, builds an AI version of himself to handle his messaging with co-workers. \u201cI built AI Gilfoyle, who ships features to production for JustPaid<\/a>,\u201d Pinnaka continued. The AI works with its team while managing a team of agents who do infrastructure architecture review, planning, implementation, QA and operations.<\/p>\n JustPaid co-founders, from left: Anelya Grant, Daniel Kivatinos and Vinay Pinnaka.<\/p>\n Stateless agents, structured memory<\/p>\n The inspiration for JustPaid came from a desire to address\u00a0institutional memory challenges inherent in enterprise organizations. \u201cWhile we were building multiple products, I felt that adding more engineers always comes with its own downsides,\u201d Pinnaka said. \u201cFirst, there is ramp-up. Second, the historical knowledge about what JustPaid had done is very institutional.\u201d<\/p>\n For JustPaid, that knowledge includes code, infrastructure, customer context and the finance logic behind the company\u2019s billing software. Connecting those dots \u201crequires someone who has at least some accounting background, or at least someone who has taken a finance class,\u201d Pinnaka said.<\/p>\n Pinnaka wondered why AI couldn\u2019t serve as the dot-connector. He set out to build an agent as a teacher before it became an agent as a worker. \u201cI thought: \u2018Why can\u2019t I create an AI agent that teaches new people joining the team and gives them the full context already present in the system?\u2019\u201d Pinnaka said. \u201cThat was the initial goal.\u201d<\/p>\n JustPaid\u2019s reminder workflow editor builds scheduled email sequences keyed to invoice due dates, with payment-method details and pay links inserted automatically.<\/p>\n He started by feeding OpenClaw, a popular open-source agent framework, structured knowledge about the company. It worked. \u201cI started by creating an AI employee with OpenClaw, creating or dumping the knowledge we already have into structured markdowns by company, customer, team, functionality and feature,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Heartbeat and soul file<\/p>\n Then the agent\u2019s job description expanded. \u201cInitially, it was a tool that helped people understand what was happening with our codebase, our infrastructure and the company,\u201d Pinnaka said. \u201cThen we slowly added one tool after another.\u201d<\/p>\n It later became something of a Swiss Army knife of engineering, capable of managing infrastructure, QA and production triage. Now, he said, the system can watch production systems, triage errors and push work back to the human team.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, it can monitor our infrastructure,\u201d Pinnaka said. \u201cIf there is an error in our logs, it automatically checks: Who is the customer? Why did it happen? Is there a fix already in place? If there is no fix, can we deploy one? It can do investigation and debugging like an engineer, create a PR and notify the team: this is a bug, and this customer is being affected.\u201d<\/p>\n The Revenue Metrics Dashboard tracks MRR, ARR, churn and collection time alongside monthly recurring revenue trends.<\/p>\n That cadence runs on what Pinnaka calls a heartbeat, referring to the OpenClaw method of orchestrating periodic agent turns<\/a>. \u201cOpenClaw also has a heartbeat concept, similar to a manager checking in with an employee at specific hours in the day,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can set up a heartbeat every 30 minutes to look at all the services that are running.\u201d If the agent finds something worth flagging, it routes the question back to the right Slack channel.<\/p>\n Cadence is one layer of the design. Identity is another. \u201cIt started as a simple employee and became something that can autonomously drive development and debugging practices,\u201d Pinnaka said. The mechanism that gives the agent a durable role is OpenClaw\u2019s \u201csoul file,\u201d a configuration layer for character, instructions and delegation procedures. \u201cThe thing OpenClaw has that the existing tools lack is the soul file. You can assign a character, instructions and delegation procedures to OpenClaw so it acts according to those rules.\u201d Claude Code and Codex allow some customization. OpenClaw\u2019s soul file gives the agent a more persistent identity to work from.<\/p>\n Engineering as delegation<\/p>\n![\"JustPaid](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/JustPaid-Cofounders-Daniel-Kivatinos-Anelya-Grant-Vinay-Pinnaka-8-1.jpg\")
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