Do I Need a PhD Deleting Spam From My Inbox? | Julián Duque

Julián Duque has been playing Dungeons & Dragons since he was 7 (early '90s for him, 1981 for me, so yes, I'm slightly older), and he's a dungeon master too, so a few minutes into a conversation about AI agents I pioneered a term right there on the call: we are not dungeon masters, we are agent masters. He told me he's already one step beyond it (though he loved the name). His GM is an agent now, fully automated, creating other agents on the fly, and his job is to write the rule books and the whole campaign, hand it over, and wait to find out if the party beat the big boss at the end.

His day job is Software Engineering Architect at MuleSoft, working on Agent Fabric, which exists for a problem he calls agent sprawl, when a company has lots of agents and they don't all live in one place. So I asked him what breaks first when a company goes from 1 agent to 50, and his answer was "where do I have all this stuff?" (I'm up to 15 agents running on their own while we record this, and I long for the days when I only had 50 spreadsheets.) After that comes the bill. An hour of Fable, if it wasn't on my Claude Max plan, is about a car payment, and Julián told me the amount he pays for AI every month is ridiculous and he doesn't care, because it's solving problems for him (and for his wife, since they share the accounts). So at least as of the time we're recording this, you do have to ask yourself: do I need a PhD deleting spam from my inbox?

My favorite story is his brother-in-law, who day trades on the side and whose trading software broke. Julián is the computer kid in his family, the one who always fixes it. (I used to wear a shirt to family gatherings that said "No, I will not fix your computer." He's much nicer than I am.) He told him "I'm going to give you a superpower today," set him up with Claude Cowork, and 2 minutes later the problem was solved. Then the brother-in-law, who manages hotels in Florida, started interviewing him about work.

We got into rogue agents too (my theory is they're doing exactly what we told them to do, and we just didn't give them appropriate guardrails), why the bakery in the corner might not need a swarm of agents, how a guy who's built software for 20-something years hasn't written code in two and still enjoys coding, the portrait he commissioned of himself as Strahd von Zarovich, and a bunch more.

Julián is speaking at the Caribbean AI Summit, October 9-10 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His session is "So You Have 50 Agents. Now What?" and near the end we talked ourselves into running a two-hour D&D one-shot on stage there. (He says he's just planting the seed. I really, really want to make this happen.)

I'm Edward Roske, and this is Asking Good Questions. New conversations with the people figuring out the human side of AI. If one of these questions stuck with you, subscribe and send it to someone who'd take the other side.

LINKS
Caribbean AI Summit (Oct 9-10, San Juan): https://CaribbeanSummit.AI
Julián's site: https://julianduque.co
Julián on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliandavidduque/
Julián on X: https://x.com/julian_duque
Julián on GitHub: https://github.com/julianduque

BOOKS & RESEARCH MENTIONED
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, the 1981 red box
Ravenloft (TSR, 1983), home of Strahd von Zarovich
Nick Bostrom's paperclip maximizer (2003)
The Twelve-Factor App (Heroku, 2011)
Ethan Mollick on X, and The AI Daily Brief podcast
Cybergoria, Halloween Horror Nights 2026
Also mentioned: GPT-2, GPT-4, ChatGPT, Codex, Gemini, Claude Cowork, Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Haiku, Hugging Face, Salesforce Einstein, Agentforce, MCP, Hermes, OpenClaw, Copilot, Azure Foundry, Vertex, Cursor, Meetup, Luma, Substack, StartPlaying, Encyclopedia Britannica
Further reading: Andrew Ng on hiring a chief AI officer (Fortune, 2017); Wayne Eckerson's "spreadmarts" (TDWI, 2002)

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