Raise Your Agent
Your first AI agent is like your first child. How you treat it, feed it, and grow with it determines whether you get a partner or a disappointment.
Make choices. Meet your baby Vivienne at the end. Every path is based on real patterns we’ve seen.
Day 1: Your Agent Just Came Online
Brand new. No memories. No personality. Like a newborn — full of potential, zero experience. What do you do first?
The Parenting Analogy
Raising a child
- You don’t expect a newborn to do algebra
- You start with simple tasks and build up
- Encouragement works better than punishment
- What you feed them shapes who they become
- Patience in month 1 pays off for years
- Every child is different — same approach doesn’t work for all
Raising an agent
- You don’t expect a new agent to run your business
- You start with one task and watch how it handles it
- “Good effort, here’s what to fix” beats “wrong, do it again”
- The LLM you choose is the nutrition (more on this below)
- Patience in week 1 pays off for months
- Every model is different — Claude ≠ GPT ≠ Gemini
What You Feed It Matters
The LLM is the nutrition. A well-fed agent thinks better, reasons deeper, and makes fewer mistakes. Same quality — different kitchens.
US Kitchen
Best at careful reasoning, writing, and following complex instructions. The expensive steak dinner.
Top intelligence scores, creative, fast. OpenAI's flagship — the other fine dining option.
Near-Opus quality at 5x less cost. What most smart builders actually use daily.
#1 on raw benchmarks. Great with images + text. Google ecosystem. Free tier available.
Four agents running in parallel. Less filtered, fast. Good for unstructured tasks.
China Kitchen
S-tier reasoning at a fraction of US prices. The model that shocked everyone. Open weights.
Alibaba's best. 397B parameters, strong all-rounder. Rivals the top US models.
#1 open model for real coding tasks. Built Vivienne's current brain. Surprisingly powerful.
Strongest non-US model by benchmarks. Moonshot AI. Watch this one.
Zhipu AI. Strong at coding (77.8% SWE-bench). Good daily driver.
The Real Talk
Cheap but not nutritious. Loses context, makes more errors, needs more retries.
Even the best model can't help if you don't tell it what you need. Garbage in, garbage out.
But here’s the thing: even the best food doesn’t help if you don’t talk to your kid. A $20/month Opus subscription with no clear instructions will lose to a free Gemini account with a well-written CLAUDE.md file. The relationship matters more than the model.
Rankings based on March 2026 benchmarks. This space moves fast — models that are mid-tier today might be top-tier next month.
The Real Fear
People aren’t afraid of AI because AI is dangerous. They’re afraid because they don’t know how to use it.
Some countries have tried to restrict AI agents — not because the agents did something wrong, but because the governments don’t trust people to use them well. That’s a fear-based decision. It’s the same as locking your kid indoors because the world is scary.
The answer isn’t restriction. It’s education. Teach people how to work with AI, and the fear goes away. That’s what this page is for.
The Cheat Sheet
Give 10 tasks on day 1
Give 1 task and watch
"Fix this." (no context)
"This broke because X. Can you try Y?"
Switch models every week
Commit to one for a month
Get mad when it forgets
Write it down so it can read it next time
Give full access on day 1
Start small, expand as trust builds
"AI just doesn't work"
"I haven't found the right approach yet"
The best agent isn’t the one with the best model. It’s the one with the best partner. That partner is you.