While the world was distracted by talking dolls, Grammarly quietly built an AI that could act. They didn’t use a better model. They used a better weapon: Coda.
Your Prompts Are a Prayer to an Amnesiac God
Let’s be brutally honest. The entire AI industry is captivated by a lie. We’ve anointed “prompt engineering” as a mystical art, a high priesthood for coaxing wisdom from silicon gods.
It’s a sham. We are meticulously polishing the conversational skills of a machine with terminal amnesia.
We were promised an omniscient partner, an AI co-pilot. What we got was a brilliant intern with no long-term memory, an entity we must re-brief from scratch every five minutes. This isn’t productivity. It’s digital babysitting for a machine that can recite Shakespeare but struggles to remember your name or perform precise calculations.
Today’s large language models are amnesiacs by design. We celebrate their ballooning context windows—a million, two million tokens—as if it were memory. It’s not. It’s a bigger notepad. A volatile transcript that dissolves into the ether the moment you close the tab. This architecture condemns us to a state of digital shrapnel: your project plan lives in Slack, your research is scattered across browser tabs, your decisions are buried in email, and your draft is in a doc. We ask our AI to be intelligent, but we force it to operate blindfolded, guessing the shape of our work by touching one disconnected piece at a time.
This makes you the AI’s external hard drive. You are the connective tissue. You perform the soul-crushing labor of copying, pasting, and re-explaining context, bridging the gap with every single query. This isn’t a feature. It’s a catastrophic, unforgivable design flaw.
Stop Describing. Start Commanding.
For a moment, I thought the answer was contexting—the architectural discipline of curating a rich data environment for an AI agent. It was the right instinct, but the wrong verb. It was a step away from the vacant art of prompting, but it was still just talking at the machine.
You cannot build a skyscraper by describing it to a pile of bricks, no matter how eloquently. You need an architectural plan, a crane, and a crew. Prompting is the description. Coda is the crane and the blueprint. It transforms your context from a static pile of information into a dynamic set of executable instructions.
The true frontier isn’t what an AI knows. It’s what it can do. This demands a new class of software: an Agentic Orchestration Framework. A system that doesn’t just talk, but commands, coordinates, and executes. It directs multiple specialized agents—AI, automation, and human—across complex, multi-step workflows with unwavering precision.
The archetype for this framework has been hiding in plain sight: Coda.
Forget the “all-in-one doc” marketing. That was the Trojan horse. Coda is a workflow engine for manufacturing bespoke, agentic software without writing a line of code. Its architecture is the very blueprint for orchestration:
- Docs as the Command Center: The unified surface where human intent and AI execution converge.
- Structured Tables as the Memory: A shared, persistent “brain” that provides unwavering context, rendering the amnesiac chat log obsolete.
- Packs as the Limbs: The API-driven connectors that give agents power over the real world—to manipulate Google Calendar, create Jira tickets, or rewrite Salesforce records.
- Automations as the Nervous System: The rule-based engine that triggers actions and executes entire workflows with inhuman speed and reliability.
This was never a document app. It’s a factory for building intelligent actors.
The Grammarly Gambit: An Empire in Two Moves
While the market obsessed over chatbot demos and press releases, Grammarly executed a two-step strategic coup to build the world’s first true agentic productivity platform. Anyone who saw these as unrelated acquisitions wasn’t just missing the story; they were illiterate in the language of power.
Move 1 (Acquire the Brain) : Seize the Orchestration Framework
In late 2024, Grammarly acquired Coda. They didn’t buy a popular doc app. They bought the operating system for their future AI agents. This was the foundational act of war. As undeniable proof, Coda founder Shishir Mehrotra wasn’t just given a board seat; he was installed as Grammarly’s new CEO. He isn’t running a company; he is performing a hostile takeover of its DNA, injecting Coda’s agentic framework into a platform with 40 million daily active users.
Move 2 (Conquer the Battlefield): Seize the Critical Interface
Months later, Grammarly acquired Superhuman. This was not about adding a slick email client. Superhuman is what Mehrotra calls the “perfect staging ground for orchestrating multiple AI agents simultaneously.” Email is the chaotic nexus where work, communication, and tasks collide. Grammarly didn’t buy Superhuman for its pathetic summarization features; they bought the most valuable turf in professional life to serve as the GUI for their Coda-powered agentic backend.
Imagine it: A sales agent, a support agent, and a scheduling agent collaborating within a single email draft, orchestrated by the Coda engine, pulling live context from connected Packs, executing tasks across a dozen SaaS apps. That is the gambit.
Your AI Stack is a Museum Piece
The chasm between the dying paradigm and the emerging one is not an increment; it is a cliff. One is a toy, the other is a weapon. One talks, the other acts. The stack Grammarly is building does not compete with the old one. It renders it irrelevant.
The Moat Isn’t the Model; It’s the Machine
The winners of the AI war will not be the companies with the largest language model. That is a commodity race to the bottom. They will be the ones who own the orchestration framework that makes those models act. Building a better chatbot today is like perfecting the horse-drawn carriage in the age of the automobile. The real innovation was the assembly line and the highway system.
The only defensible moat is the machine: the framework that enables action, the integrations that give it reach, the structured data that serves as its memory, and the user workflows that become its territory.
Stop asking if your AI is smart. Start demanding that it act. Stop celebrating prompts. Start building engines of execution.
The future of work isn’t a conversation. It’s a command. The companies that understand this are building empires. The rest are polishing tombstones.
ps. A warm welcome to Rahul and the SuperHuman team.
