Angus McLean

Useful AI Agents Need Smaller Contexts and Simpler Representations

Angus McLean, an AI Director at OLIVER, argues that useful agents are not the most autonomous ones but the best constrained. Drawing on OLIVER’s production use of AI across thousands of daily creative assets, he says builders should resist both model and developer tendencies toward verbosity and over-engineering: use curated documentation instead of open web access, ask how little context a task needs, choose simple representations such as HTML when they work, and avoid automating jobs they cannot do themselves.