Why You.com’s CTO Thinks We’re Overbuilding AI Agents

Saahil Jain (CTO @ You.com) built Ari, a deep research agent that hit state of the art on industry benchmarks. Then he stripped most of the orchestration out of it. In this episode of 1 IDEA, Suresh Mathew sits down with Saahil Jain to unpack why most teams are still engineering agents like it's 2024, and what actually survives as the models get better. We cover: Why heavy orchestration is a 2024-era agent mistake The three components of every agent: model, tools, and harness How You.com measures agent consistency with real evals The self-driving cars and roads analogy for building agents in 2026 Why search works completely differently for agents than for humans CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 01:03 Why You.com Dialed Down Agent Orchestration 04:44 Model, Tools, and Harness 08:58 What Dialing Down The Harness Means 10:45 What Makes A Good Agent 12:42 Measuring Agent Consistency With Evals 18:28 Self-Driving Cars vs Roads 24:15 How You.com Went From Search To Agents 30:35 Search For Agents vs Search For Humans