The Era of Agents is Among Us

We are past the point where the primary way people interact with software is by poking at screens themselves. Humans are not going anywhere, but the default path has changed. The agent sits between the person and the system now.

The old pattern was direct: human to UI to product logic to APIs.

The emerging pattern is mediated: human to their agent to capabilities (yours, mine, others) to outcome.

That mediation matters. The agent carries persistent context including history, preferences, unfinished threads, calendar state, email snippets, and communication style. It uses this to resolve the inevitable ambiguities in natural language intent. Then it orchestrates the work across services. A single request like "pull balances from all my accounts and summarize them in Notion" can touch half a dozen APIs without the human ever logging in anywhere new.

If your product still forces someone to click through nested menus and forms for something routine, it feels like legacy in this world.

The primitives have been here for a while. Stripe, Twilio, Plaid, Notion, calendar providers, AWS SDKs. We have spent the last decade turning everything into callable pieces. Agents are simply the new caller. Even the things we used to think were inescapably human facing (consoles, CLIs, dashboards) almost always rest on APIs that were designed for automation in the first place.

The question has shifted from "how polished is the interface" to "how cleanly and reliably can an external agent invoke what you offer".

Take a small, concrete case: the idea of sending location updates every mile during a hike. In the old model, you would spin up a whole app. Permissions, contact picker, background tracking, scheduling, error handling for spotty signal, onboarding. A narrow tool with a lot of scaffolding.

In the agent model, the user just says it once: "Every mile, text Christian my location." The agent figures out which Christian (from recency, frequency, context), secures location access, sets the trigger, calls a messaging service, handles retries if needed. No dedicated app, no funnel, no perpetual maintenance. The only persistent surface is probably the agent's activity log.

If you are tempted to build that hiking app in 2026, stop and ask the real question: what small capability is still missing that keeps agents from doing this well? Ship that primitive. It is usually the higher leverage move.

Strategically, you have to choose: are you building the agent, or are you building capabilities for agents?

Building an agent means competing on depth. Better domain models, more reliable long running workflows, stronger trust mechanics (audit logs, scoped permissions, cost guardrails, safety boundaries). But the agent layer is going to be crowded and heterogeneous. Different models, different devices, different user constraints and tastes. You will be one option among many.

Building capabilities means accepting a more humble role: you are the reliable engine, not the front door. The advantage is in how composable, atomic, and dependable your verbs are. This path is bigger than most teams expect, because it scales with every agent that comes online. But it requires discipline. You cannot keep chasing the spotlight of being "the app".

Agents want verbs, not dashboards. They want send_message(recipient, channel, content), create_record(type, fields), schedule_trigger(condition, action), fetch_status(id). They do not want to navigate wizards.

A quick filter for whatever you are considering next:

1. Does this add a new callable capability, or is it mostly another screen or view? If the latter dominates, it is probably not the most important work right now.
2. Can an agent drive the full outcome end to end without constant human supervision? If not, surface the blocker. Identity resolution, permission model, retry semantics, observability. And fix it.
3. Is the UI providing genuine, hard to replicate value (compression of complexity, glanceable insight), or is it just one way to look at the data? Valuable UIs can and should exist, but they should be renderings from the same primitives the agent uses. Keep the capability stable and let presentation flex.

A short checklist for making your product agent native:

• Atomic, intention clear functions over tangled flows.
• Strong identity primitives (fuzzy lookup, context based disambiguation, confidence).
• Orchestration support: idempotency, safe retries, webhooks, partial failure handling.
• Default audit trails. Who called what, when, with what intent, what changed.
• Granular, composable permissions: scoped, time limited, revocable. Short lived per action tokens beat long sessions for security.

This is not speculative anymore. The tools are here, the agents are capable, and the pattern is emerging in real work. The teams that internalize it early, reorienting from human flows to agent callable surfaces, will have a lasting edge. The rest will spend years retrofitting.

It is a good time to be building. Just make sure you are building for the layer that actually matters now.