Your Agent's Self-Improving Swiss Army Knife: Composio CTO Karan Vaidya on Building Smart Tools
Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!
Today my guest is Karan Vaidya, CTO of Composio, a platform that allows AI agents to access more than 50,000 tools, spanning more than 1,000 apps, all through a single interface, and which is one of the best examples of the "smart tool" pattern that I've been watching out for since the MCP paradigm was introduced.
This is a sponsored episode, but as always, I have played around with the tool for the last couple of weeks, and it's clear to me that Composio does address several real problems.
For starters, core platforms like Gmail, Google Drive, and Slack don't make it easy for do-it-yourselfers to grant access to AI agents. The number of clicks required to get started is a serious barrier for casual users.
Most other tools are simpler to connect, but many aren't popular or well-documented enough for AIs to know how best to use them from the start, and sometimes quite a bit of iteration is required to get things working well.
And looking ahead, as people delegate larger and larger projects to their agents, those agents often need tools that the human never anticipated.
All of this is indeed made much easier by simply giving your agent access to Composio, which allows agents to express high-level intent, identifies the right tools for the job, and provides authentication, execution sandboxes, and logging infrastructure that few developers really want to build on their own.
In this conversation, we get into the details of how Composio works, and how they are delivering on the "smart tool" promise by using an AI-powered continuous improvement process that can detect when a tool isn't working for an agent, generate a new version in real time, and swap the upgrade into the agent's context – and which, over time, automatically identifies and diffuses successful patterns across the entire Composio customer base.
One of the most interesting arguments Karan makes is that excellence in tooling and skills can help developers avoid model lock-in. The idea is that while models have different default behaviors, they are all very good at following instructions these days, such that if you have very thorough instructions, you can probably get similar performance from any frontier model. And for cases when that doesn't work, Karan and team are also working on meta-skills to translate skills from one model provider to another, reducing switching costs even further.
Beyond that, we also hear about Karan's favorite agent use cases – which, notably, look more like full jobs than discrete tasks; his perspective on which technology companies are gaining strength from the AI wave, which are most threatened, and how sticky agent products like Intercom's Fin will prove to be over time; his thoughts on memory platforms, payment frameworks, and other tools built specifically for AI agents; and how Composio works today, which includes individual engineers managing 10s of AI agents, and for the team that manages Composio's own agentic pipeline, a token bill that exceeds human payroll.
For me, this conversation couldn't be more timely. I've put in the work to curate the context that Claude Code needs to serve as a second-brain and capable assistant, and it's become my go-to interface for just about everything I do on a computer. The next level up will be to get agents doing large-scale projects autonomously on my behalf, and as I enter this next phase, Composio will definitely be part of my stack.
I'll report back on how I'm doing, but for now, I hope you enjoy this conversation about building smart tools for AI agents, with Karan Vaidya, CTO of Composio.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz