In this episode of The Breakdown, Tom and Dave are joined by fellow YC General Partner Pete Koomen to lay out a new vision for how AI should actually work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software, but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don’t want to do. From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators, they dig into what it means to build AI-native software—and why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think.
Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply
Work at a startup: https://workatastartup.com
Chapters (Powered by https://chapterme.co/) –
0:00 – Intro
0:52 – Why AI apps are broken
2:39 – The problem with Google’s AI App
4:00 – A better way to build AI apps
5:27 – The hidden system prompt
7:57 – What if you could access the system prompt?
9:40 – The developer-user divide in software
10:48 – The "horseless carriage" metaphor
13:35 – Email reading agent demo
14:34 – Everyone can be a prompt engineer
16:23 – Why coding agents feel magical
21:42 – Training AI like a human assistant
28:45 – The problem with chatbot interfaces
29:10 – Advice for founders
