The news of agentic productivity is all over the place. There’s an explosion of side projects (1, 2), may be large enough to say creating something new has lost its unique value. There’s the other rumour that the perennial build-vs-buy software debate is now tilting in favor of build.
AI Agents have shortened the idea-to-product pipeline. Everyone and their dog is on Claude Code, churning code, writing blogs and automating things on OpenClaw or its incarnations. This is a fact.
I’ve one humble addition. AI Agents have shortened the idea-to-consumer pipeline. They have automated the consumer of the apps!
There are probably a zillion apps which solve a problem. How do you choose? What differentiates?
Two things.
One, may be we will never choose the apps. Your AI agent is going to build one for itself. In this future, apps are the throwaway artefacts just like the python or shell scripts a few years ago.
Second, you will see only those apps which your agent decides to show you. It’s like you’re paying 5$ for a pair of smart glasses and you only see what is shown to you. Your agents are those glasses, blending into your daily life and create a bubble for you to live within. Who’s in control? That company you’ve hired for five bucks.
To my lizard brain there seems to be only one way out. We must understand these models better, so much so that we can rationally cut through the layers of filters. Call them sycophancy (a fancy word for a yes-man LLM that agrees with everything you say) or a narrative that’s controlled by a few corporations to force their discourse upon you.
If you’re the one building apps, tools, websites etc please ask for open standards or protocols like the three-four letter acronyms HTTP, TCP, or the recent ones like ActivityPub. Don’t stop there, build on top of these. Think how they must evolve for Agents. Use the open-weights models available to you. Learn how the inferencing works, and what can you do to control it.
Also, while we’re at it, let’s build for agents. They are the first class consumers now! We don’t understand what it means though. Do our accessibility, privacy, and performance standards apply to them? Or is our notion of time and space too slow for these bots? Some thoughts to ponder.
Now the Apps are of the agents, by the agents, for the agents! Let’s see beyond the “by the agents” narrative.