Griot · the research desk

Field notes on the agent economy.

A griot keeps a people's record. Ours keeps the builders': what's shipping, what it costs, and what works. Every claim has a source; every number has a date; what we couldn't verify says so.

• 2026-09-26

  The split: how an AI-native firm divides work between LLMs, System One models and code

  Most calls inside an agent aren't text. They're a choice from a list, a number on a scale, a yes or no. Here's how we route every job three ways, and where a person holds the pen.

  • jev
  • architecture
  • ai-native services
  4 min
• 2026-09-25

  What we took home from the Pan-African AI Summit in Accra

  PAAIS 2026 wasn't about whether Africa belongs at the AI table. It was about evidence: regulators want proof of control, and that proof is something a firm can build and sell.

  • africa
  • policy
  • summit
  • enterprise
  3 min
• 2026-09-24

  Ten decisions African businesses are overpaying a frontier model for

  Every "is this urgent", "which team", "is this spam" and "does this need approval" is a typed decision. Here are ten we see every week in Lagos, with the question set and what code does next.

  • jev
  • smb
  • fintech
  • playbook
  2 min
• 2026-09-23

  Selling to agents on Celo: x402 v2 in one Next.js route

  No accounts, no API keys, no invoices. An agent calls your endpoint, gets a 402 with a price, signs a gasless USDC authorization, and retries. Here's the exact 2026 recipe, and the mistakes to avoid.

  • x402
  • celo
  • agent payments
  • nextjs
  3 min
• 2026-09-22

  We read company-brain's source. Here's what a multiplayer AI teammate actually runs on.

  Supermemory open-sourced its company brain. The blog describes 0–100 triage scores; the code runs on a Haiku text reply and per-channel budgets. Both are instructive, and a System One model fits exactly between them.

  • company brain
  • jev
  • harness
  • teardown
  3 min