The Assumption Everything Else Depends On

In our Agentic Buildcamp sprint 1 demo sessions, most of the first time presenters walk us through their agentic system's features. Returning builders, though, talk about their assumptions and the ones they focused on.

Every project rests on some claim about what you're building and what you're trying to get out of it. Usually one of those claims is doing more work than the rest, and if it's wrong, nothing else you build on top of it matters. If your agent helps someone make health decisions, the load-bearing assumption might be that users will actually trust and act on what it tells them. If your agent teaches a child, it might be that the child engages with the format at all. If your agent summarizes contracts, it might be that a summary is what the reader actually needed rather than the clause itself.

You can't find that assumption without first being clear about where you're trying to go. Clarity on the objective comes first. The assumptions your approach depends on come next. And somewhere in that list is the one that, if it breaks, breaks everything downstream of it. That's the one worth spending today on. The features, the UI, the color scheme, all of that is downstream of getting this right.