Knowing your limitations is the foundation of expertise
Agentic AI is rediscovering Minsky's 1986 community of agents and calling it revolutionary. The scarce thing isn't novelty, it's the humility to know what we don't know.
If you’re building “agentic AI” and can’t articulate why decomposing intelligence into specialized agents might work better than monolithic systems, and when it won’t, you’re engineering without foundations. In 1986 Marvin Minsky wrote: “The mind is a community of agents. Each has limited powers… The powers of mind emerge from their interactions, for none of the agents, by itself, has significant intelligence.” We’re rediscovering this now and calling it revolutionary.
The problem isn’t being new, it’s the pretense
We’re not writing this as experts. We’re not MIT professors. Back in 2002 we were in Bosnia demonstrating linear regression with CA Neugents. More than 20 years later we’re still learning, still practicing, and still very aware of how much we don’t know. What frustrates us isn’t that people are new to this. It’s the pretense. Overnight we’ve all become “agentic AI masters” armed with blog posts and framework tutorials. Knowing your limitations isn’t weakness. It’s the foundation of actual expertise.
Reference
- Minsky, M. (1986). The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster.