Avi Agola reflects on his internship at SageOx and shares a walkthrough of his project
Milkana Brace
We want to congratulate Avi Agola on wrapping up his internship at SageOx. It's been a pleasure having him on the team — his curiosity, energy, and contributions have made a real impact. We're wishing him a wonderful summer in NYC and can't wait to see what he does next.
In the two videos below, Avi reflects on his experience at SageOx and walks through a demo of the project he built.
Reflection
Demo
Transcript
Milkana: All right, Avi, it's your last day here at SageOx — and I'm happy to see you're wearing your hoodie. So I would love to hear about your experience here. Can you summarize what your internship has looked like? How long you've been here, what you focused on, and we'll take it from there.
Avi: Yeah, honestly, it has been amazing. Since I joined in around late March, early April until now — so it's been about two and a half to three months — the process of getting adjusted with the team and working has just been super smooth and easy. I think the team really prides themselves on being chaotic and being really open in terms of their ideas, and I've always felt that that is the best way to go about working on something as innovative and as interesting as SageOx.
I mean, when we talk about terms like knowledge bubbles and all of that, sometimes it's very easy to get super deep into those terms. But when you look back and you're able to see the long-term vision of what SageOx is meant to be, you're able to see that whole vision of being able to track every human and every AI agent working in the same organization and being able to really maintain that special sort of systematic integration between those two classes of workers — which is really interesting to see.
Especially in terms of the arts, there's a lot of inspiration that I feel SageOx takes in their methodology of working, which I find very fun. Ajit, the CEO, would talk about playing jazz, and when I went to a jazz club in downtown Seattle, I actually saw that — I truly understood what he meant. The way jazz players are able to be so integrated with one another while being more random and sporadic is the same sort of nature that SageOx works with. And I think as the technology further develops and as more people get their hands on the various products, there's going to be a lot of interesting team synergy over the next three to six months, and it'll be really fun to see where things go.
Milkana: Awesome. Can you talk a little bit more about what you focused on delivering as part of your internship?
Avi: As part of my internship, I focused on delivering version one of the mobile app — completely starting from basically an almost empty repository of just a couple of design docs. I went ahead and took a lot of the design elements we had in our website and other systems and began building the mobile app. Through the process I focused on the iOS version and a bit of Android, and I really made sure to keep in a lot of design elements around mobile responsiveness and other things while also consistently updating the designs when some of the core technology behind the voice recording was changing.
Originally, the app started as a very simple recording app where you can just start recording, chunks are being uploaded, and you can have meetings going outside of it. But now it's able to have a lot of new live features — it's able to track meetings happening live, start meetings within an organization from your phone or from your iPad, and it's now also able to cast. Being able to cast the live screen of meetings, and eventually the murals, you're able to cast it on Chromecast and AirPlay.
Galex: Did you write any actual code by hand?
Avi: No, I did not — and I will proudly say that I haven't. Trying to dig into a lot of the syntax to me just feels like time that could be better used elsewhere in terms of design, in terms of thinking of other things. So yeah, I did not write a single line of actual code by hand throughout the process. But by using a lot of agentic engineering techniques — techniques that the team taught me — I was really able to focus on designing proper PRDs, designing proper systems of implementation, pulling across different repositories of code, and really forming the app from scratch.
Galex: How would you say it's different compared to your other internships? Is this the first time you've done this much agentic coding?
Avi: For an internship, yes. I've done a lot of agentic coding for other past projects, but this is the most agentic engineering I've done — really pushing the limits of what agents can do. In other contexts I was always just using Cursor as-is and kind of playing around with that step by step. But now with everything I learned at SageOx, I'm really able to go out, deploy systems of agents in mass that are able to go work on different parts of the app or other codebases I've contributed to — at rapid speed.
Milkana: Can you talk about some of the unlocks — the techniques you've learned that have really accelerated your ability to deliver?
Avi: At the core level it's just really pushing as many PRs as possible and merging them as fast as I can. Earlier on I wouldn't always be in the greatest habit of doing PRs and merging for every tiny thing, but really getting a lot better at that to track different steps of the process. Learning to use new tools like Conductor and Claude Code at more extensive levels were very useful — helped me figure out what I could do with all of these agents to plan out different tasks within different repositories. And also really working on utilizing BDDs and HTML plans to be able to read through everything in a very cohesive manner and run tests in a way that just makes sense.
Milkana: Let's double-click into BDDs and HTML plans. Can you explain what they are and how they came to be useful in your development?
Avi: BDDs were a concept developed a long time ago that were essentially focused on turning normal human text test ideas into actionable tests that could be done on a computer system. The greatest part about having generative AI be able to work with us was that I was able to take some core BDDs I'd develop in collaboration with Claude and other tools and actually transform those BDDs into actual tests that Claude would be able to run on the back end — using a microVM, which was absolutely amazing and sped up a lot of my time spent testing out the app manually. It also helped me catch very minute details that I may have not noticed but AI was able to.
The thing with HTML plans was basically: reading text gets boring and monotonous. Being able to transform specific plans and PRDs into HTML — with specific design renderings and diagram renderings — helped me understand what I was really building, how I was really working on things, and also allowed me to understand where potential conflicts might arise, which I could then correct a lot more easily.
Milkana: Awesome. Can you talk a little bit about the culture that you experienced at SageOx over the last couple of months — anything unusual, anything you've shared with your friends, or something you'll take away and potentially introduce in future teams you join?
Avi: Agentic engineering is the core of everything at SageOx, which is something that I really love and have learned to really appreciate throughout the process. The team really prides themselves on being a very chaotic team and one that's very hard for everyone to adopt. Oddly enough, I did not really have an issue with that. I loved every aspect of the team's synergy, every aspect of the team's openness to try new ideas and really make things work at rapid speed — something that I was always really open to and really happy to just be working alongside. I never felt like there was a day gone by where nothing was really happening. Everything was iterating so fast, new ideas were always coming up in conversations that would actually get turned into live actionable things.
I think my mention of "room OS" into the lexicon really made a big shift in how SageOx wants to approach the long-term vision — being able to use their memory infrastructure to help support teams in meetings, not only in corporate environments but in residential environments, academia, and the like. So overall, it was amazing here. I would love to come back when I can.
Galex: We really enjoyed having you — can't wait to see you back in September.
Avi: Yeah, that's good.
Milkana: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Avi — it's been great having you as part of the team.