Part 1, March 2026.
When electric engines first arrived on factory floors, productivity gains were modest - until factories redesigned their layouts around the new power source. Only then did the true efficiency boost materialize in factories. A bit oversimplified but basically true - Sauce.
When it comes to business IT, the ERP system is the virtual representation of a company. Thus, would it not make sense to create ERP systems around the new reality of LLM‑based agents joining the workforce? The goal is to remove friction for agents automating large parts of administrative tasks. This is inspired by the very interesting podcast Shell Game.
A central assumption here is that when agents work together with humans, a common ground truth of what is actually going on in the business will still be needed. This shared information (“business context” in quasi‑SAP terms) needs to be recorded in a database for cooperation, auditing, quality control, general bookkeeping, etc.
I converted an ungodly amount of electrical power to heat and tokens in order to implement a proof-of-concept of the ARP system outlined above. Most (that's to say all) of the actual programming was done in Go using Cline with Z.AI's GLM-5.
The system currently consists of three components.
arp serverThe server‑side component.
introspect: retrieve the GraphQL schemaquery: flexible information retrieval based on GraphQL queriesmutate: create, update or delete messages, tasks, or notes on the arp platformarp_agentA ‘scaffold’ or ‘harness’ around LLMs to interact with the ARP server.
arp_cliA REPL‑style command‑line interface to interact with users (human or agents) on the ARP server