The Two Zoom Levels of Agents
One of the hardest product design problems we’ve encountered with Tonkotsu is calibrating the right zoom level — how close or far the user feels from the work. You can see examples of the challenges in this play out across the industry:
Codex gets flak for going “heads-down” for too long compared to Claude. Users feel too zoomed out from the work.
By contrast, Cursor and IDEs are starting to feel too zoomed in. When the majority of code is written by agents, an editor-first UI is a misfit.
We saw evidence of this zoom mismatch in Tonkotsu as well:
Users wanted coding tasks to be more granular. We did a retention analysis and found that the most retentive users had more granular tasks than unretentive users. Qualitatively, we also got a ton of feedback about showing detailed agent trajectories (we initially hid them).
At the same time, users wanted to take actions that are less granular. Usage data clearly revealed that they preferred to delegate an entire set of tasks at once, and review an entire feature vs individual commits.
In other words, users wanted us to zoom in and zoom out at the same time.
These two points had us scratching our heads. However, one of our core convictions is that developers are transitioning to being managers of teams of agents. And when we applied this manager frame to the data points, we realized they are consistent: managers delegate at a high level but want updates at a finer-grained level. A manager will say, “Can you drive project X”, but when you report back, they want to hear updates about milestones and tasks. It gives them confidence that the project was broken down thoughtfully and moving forward.
The key learning: there are two different zoom levels that product builders need to intentionally design for — the granularity of actions and the granularity of observations. Actions need to be coarse enough that the user can be efficient and productive. Observations need to be fine-grained enough that the user is confident that progress is being made. The products that get both zoom levels right feel natural. The ones that only optimize for one feel either overwhelming or opaque.
Since our initial analysis, we've redesigned task creation and delegation around these two zoom levels, and it's already showing results, including a #1 launch on Product Hunt. If you're interested in what this looks like in practice, check it out at tonkotsu.ai.