How To Design Better AI Apps

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. Pete's essay, "AI Horseless Carriages": https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages 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