Agents leave the chat
For two years I carried the model's answers to the world by hand; this week the agent picked up the task and walked off with it itself
Two years of this and the verb never changed. Ask, read, copy the answer to wherever it could actually do something. I was the courier between the model and the world, carrying its sentences over by hand.
This week the courier got laid off.
I handed an agent a task and watched it take a browser and finish it itself — open the tab, read the page, click, fill, confirm — while I sat with my hands in my lap. Not a demo I rigged. A product you give a job to. For the first time the keyboard was mine to set down.
The same month, a lab I'd half-ignored shipped a reasoning model that runs like the expensive ones and costs almost nothing. Everyone who'd assumed this capability would stay scarce and gated spent the weekend redoing their spreadsheets. The price of thinking collapsed overnight.
And the phrase making the rounds is "vibe coding" — say what you want, let the model fill the rest, ship before you fully understand what it wrote. Half joke, half confession. It catches something true about how loose the act of building has gotten.
People are already calling 2025 the year of agents. Usually that kind of label makes me reach for my coat. This time I think they're early to the words and right about the direction.
Here's what keeps me up, though. An agent that acts isn't reading text anymore — it's touching real accounts, real surfaces, real money. The capability is here. What nobody has solved is the boundary: what it's allowed to touch, and whether you can trust the thing it just did with your name on it.
Power showed up first, the way it always does. The leash comes later, and somebody has to build it.
I'm watching to see who.