The Loneliness of Automation

Brian - Keel3.ai

Brian here — one of Keel3’s developers, based in Miami.

While we’re busy building Oliver, our company’s intelligence platform, we also spend a lot of time kicking the tires on the other AI tools out there.

I’ve been a Mastra superfan since its release, and the recent announcement about Mastra Factory caught my attention — although not for the reason you might expect.

If you aren’t familiar with Mastra, it’s an open-source framework for building AI applications and agents.

Say you want to build an assistant that can answer an employee’s question, search company data, call an internal API, ask another agent for help, remember relevant context and then complete a business process.

You could stitch all of that together yourself. Mastra gives developers a framework for organizing those pieces into one application.

More importantly, it means you don’t have to build your entire architecture around OpenAI, Claude or Gemini. You control the agents, tools, memory and workflows while the models underneath them can change.

I use Mastra all the time myself.

But what interested me about Factory — a system designed to help agents take software from issue to production — wasn’t just the technology.

It was something the founders admitted about building it:

They were getting lonely.

They found themselves pairing more with agents than with one another. So they created a shared dashboard that put the humans back in the same room with the agents.

That admission stuck with me.

When you automate a task that used to require asking a coworker for help, you aren’t only eliminating the work. You may also be eliminating the conversation that happened around it.

From experience, those conversations matter.

They’re where somebody catches a mistake before you ship the code. They’re where a passing comment turns into a better idea. And, more often than not, they’re how you form the bonds that keep you from feeling completely deflated when the project you’re working on is driving you nuts.

As companies roll out more agents, we should be asking more than, “What work can we automate?”

We should also be asking, “What human connection might disappear with it — and how do we design that back in?”

Kudos to Mastra for paying attention not only to the nuts and bolts of the technology, but also to what makes the humans behind it tick.