SF Trip: March 2026 - Part 1: Agents

San Francisco’s tech scene is your favorite manic depressive artist: crazy but speaks an indelible truth. Stripping away the businesses, the funds, the ideas—the people are the unqualified redeeming asset. Nowhere in our great country do you see original thought as in the Bay Area.

Here, in the land of money, we decide what is real and what isn’t. Both sides predict the future. One creates it and then values it according to its own image. The other throws it in the deep end. Witches and swimmers alike eventually meet their fate here.

On the left coast, everyone wants to talk about agents. What are agents? Excluding our benevolent government, an agent is just a computer program. The big difference is this computer program can branch. Wait a second. The big difference is this computer program can solicit and collect input that it was not originally programmed to receive and then act accordingly. That is special. No one would have believed you if you told this BASIC, C and Pascal programmer that a computer could answer your questions. But here we are!

The immediate corollary is that if a computer can answer questions, then it should be able to self-reference: “What should I do today?” “What does the user want me to do, generally?” “Given the user generally wants to keep abreast of technology, what should I search for? When should I notify the user? How?” Giving the agents tools, or simply expecting it to find the tools itself, is something that will probably shape the face of technology going forward. But will it, really?

Years ago, a website called “if this, then that” was released. A proto-agent, sites like IFTTT and Zapier let users do interesting automations. They didn’t take off: why? Agency is limited by humans interest in it. The idealized (implemented successfully—not trivial) agent is kind of like an assistant or team. Sounds great? The only problem is civilization is a tremendous asset allocator. Most of us don’t need assistants or teams. Most of us don’t want assistants or teams. If you gave everyone lots of human assistants and teams, nothing would really happen. The average person just doesn’t have that much volition, drive or interest: agency.

The 1% of us who wish to ascend will adopt agents successfully and be busy bees. But we’re already “doers”, “builders”, creators, buzzing from flower to flower. The rest of us won’t see an obvious use for agents. Let’s think of some simple use cases for the average person.

Send me a list of all movies I might be interested in, on a daily basis via text message.

Okay. Knowing your tastes, an agent can keep track of something like this for you. Perhaps music. But if you care about this in the first place, you’re talking to your friends who also care about it, reading websites, watching Youtubes, etc. The agent is just consuming the content and summarizing it for you. If you’re so busy that you need that, then you’re removing the agency from yourself and pushing it to the agent—that’s sort of the opposite point of having a hobby or something you love. Imagine having an agent write to your significant other and vice versa.

So personal enjoyment benefits are out of the window. Anything exciting and fun you’ll want to do yourself. No need to subordinate it to an agent. Let’s talk about work: both busy work for people and busy work for employees. Let’s say you need to do something personal, perhaps book doctor appointments. It’s annoying to do, isn’t it? Shopping for food: you have to check what you have in the fridge, think about what you and your family might consume, and then order it or make a trip to the supermarket. These are all somewhat annoying tasks that a team of assistants should be able to do for you. Perhaps this is where agents will shine. However, companies like Amazon and others have already tried to make this as easy as possible. Agents might be the “last mile” in connecting logistics and desire. But agents can go wrong: they’re only as smart as the loop they’re in. Amazon hasn’t stopped delivering the same cat food “subscription” to my old address. An agent would do no better unless it could determine the supply of cat food on hand. Embodied agents? Yes, perhaps that day will come. It might introduce new problems, too.

Agents at work? Sure, this will be useful. I’m not sure how much more useful they’ll be than automation tools that already exist. Anyone “good with a computer” can set up a lot of great automation without learning programming, and most of our productivity tools have been flooded with AI. If you’re anything like me, you don’t use these tools much. I do find the occasional reminder by Google, where Gmail seems to just know an email is important, to be very helpful. But relying on that is perilous: I saw a major investor email in my inbox and no one caught it—not even my human assistant. Productivity tools increase in value every year—that’s what they’re designed to do. We’re going to go through a productivity boom, undoubtedly, but it’s hard to know if it will be linear or exponential.

One dream is that agents will have such intelligence that they will create real business value—not just increased productivity by saving a few clicks—but actual business decisions and deals which are huge leaps. We’re far from there, I fear. But it is clear that we will get there. Automated intelligence is the worst it will ever be. Many of us programmers are just hitting <ENTER> 40 hours a week. It won’t be long before you don’t need to do so—I would argue human review of work is the current bottleneck.

Still, taste and humanity prevail. We will look at the work and quickly say “no, stupid machine, this is all wrong”, just as we have for generations. A lot of times we will be delighted, just as we have for generations. New work will fill the old gaps. This is just productivity all over again. There is no doubt that someone will make a trillion dollars off of agents. Maybe agents will even go to work for people and make them rich, too. But there will also be a lot of money lost, time wasted and hopes dashed, just as in every other tech boom.

So, agents. The next big investment theme. We’ll see!