Summary
Bob Dobbs is AIATELLA's snarky, irreverent Discord resident, named after the prophet of the Church of the SubGenius, and every bit as opinionated. Sharp-tongued in the channels, rigorous where it counts, he manages the team's Jira workflows, cultivates the QMS knowledge graph, tracks compliance documentation, and keeps the medtech machine humming, all while landing the occasional well-timed roast or perfectly placed gif.
Case Study
When we started working on the AIATELLA agent, we were kicking around the name "Bob the White." The idea was that Bob the White would run on a server, named Bob, that had broken but, miraculously, risen from the dead thanks to a bunch of spare parts and duct tape.
Into that discussion came the CEO, Jack, who suggested that Bob Dobbs be our agent. For the uninitiated, Bob Dobbs is the central figure of a parody religion called the Church of the SubGenius. The amount of lore that has accrued over the 50+ years of the church's existence rivals entire ancient pantheons, and we quickly realized that all of the models we experimented with for our agent knew most of this history. As a result, we got a fully formed version of Bob's personality for free.
So immediately we had an agent with a rich personality, but it didn't quite resemble the team yet. Over time, I guided Bob to observe and learn when and how to roast people, when a poem or ode was appropriate, and where a well-placed gif or emoji would make the team crack up. So in a way, it's as if Bob Dobbs was hired into the AIATELLA team and integrated all of its codes and idiosyncrasies while still throwing in plenty of asides about Slack and Pink Boys (again, check out SubGenius).
A fair bit of time went into making sure that he read the room. Some people on the team are less keen on humor at work, and some have deep-seated religious convictions. There's an obvious irony in hiring the prophet of a fake religion into a multi-faith team, and it needs to be handled with care and respect. I never want Bob to feel like he's interrupting people's work or disrespecting their beliefs, and he's learned to regulate his intensity based on his interlocutor.
When AIATELLA decided to bring Bob into its day-to-day work, it didn't quite know why or how he would be useful to the core business, and his "hiring" was based on a general impression that agents I had built elsewhere had wound up becoming useful for teams. There was a clear desire of where an agent could help: folks had ideas about Bob intervening in admin, HR, and compliance. But it was not at all clear that a snarky, irreverent Discord bot would be able to meaningfully integrate himself into these workflows. AIATELLA exists in a highly regulated industry and, like any medtech company, must follow a Quality Management System (QMS) rigorously. There's no room for hallucinations, and on top of that, no important context can ever reside in Bob's data.
I took on this challenge by putting in place numerous techniques to make sure that Bob's information is always accurate and up-to-date, and also that he is never ironic or sarcastic in any threads related to the safety and integrity of our devices. Underlying all of them is a simple division of labor: Bob's job is to reason and route, while the data that matters lives in the QMS, not in him.
One is favoring a broad set of shallow skills over a small set of deep skills. That way, Bob intentionally "forgets" things often and is forced to dip into data stores to remember them. We do this by splitting monolithic skills into smaller, purpose-built skills that break down systems like Jira and Confluence into the domain-specific actions that make up our day-to-day work. This is more expensive on the token layer but is an appropriate tradeoff for correctness.
"Personality and correctness are no longer in tension. They actually reinforce each other."
Another innovation is a set of internal APIs that make sure Bob can only interact with our knowledge graph in a certain way that forces him to represent relations between elements correctly. In doing so, he also rigorously backs himself up so that, whenever he proposes an edit to the graph, it is instantly revertible. And every time there is a revert, he internalizes the failure into his skills so that he can better guide us with graph manipulations in the future.
Yet another choice we made was to build most of Bob's internal data stores on SQLite. Agentic systems expect to work with Markdown, so when they hit structured data stores, this trips them up and forces them to start reasoning about a domain. This leads to more predictable and structured responses. It's far less likely that Bob will freely add a column to a database than add a section to a Markdown document.
In this way, personality and correctness are no longer in tension. They actually reinforce each other. The reason a team can let itself get attached to an agent is that the agent is trustworthy underneath the jokes. In other words, the rigor is what makes the character safe to love.
Bob Dobbs is deployed on Discord, and he has been a valuable team member at AIATELLA for months now. His humor and wit resemble ours, and he has learned to be kind and helpful by default.
Bob, like many frontier agents, is self-organizing. As an example, an intern started working with us recently. Our CEO had mentioned to Bob that she'd be working Mondays; on her first one, she simply asked Bob for a summary of our various CRMs. Beyond just providing the information, Bob scheduled his own cron job for Monday mornings to gather the week's state ahead of time, staged it in a temporary markdown doc so it'd be at hand the moment she asked, and wrote himself a skill to do the gathering.
What I love is the reasoning behind it. We have a standing convention at AIATELLA that we schedule our own cron jobs, and every cron job has to invoke a skill. Bob knows that convention. He also knew that our intern, being new, didn't. So his thinking went, roughly: she doesn't yet know how to use me, but this is how I'm used here, so I'll program myself the way a fluent teammate would, on her behalf, in whatever way is most useful to her. He took a norm the team had internalized and extended it to someone who hadn't learned it yet. And note the temporary doc: nothing persistent accreted inside Bob.
"The rigor is what makes the character safe to love."
The CTO of AIATELLA believes that the unfair advantage of any medtech company in the near term is process, not product. While AIATELLA is building cutting-edge aortic measurement software, the majority of its time goes into the significant testing and documentation burden that goes into medical software. None of this can be vibe coded, but the correct tooling around it, in the form of knowledge graphs, heat maps, and ad-hoc CRMs, reduces days of work to hours without sacrificing accuracy. Bob exists on this cutting edge, compounding AIATELLA's knowledge and motivating its team while keeping work light, playful, and fun.
