Conquer the World with Agents but Keep your Soul
Agentic Economies, Writing Code, and Writing Itself
Welcome to a whirlwind of thoughts and information that is geared to give you a leg up in this brave new world. Welcome to the future, folks.
New Agentic Economies
A whole new economy is being built around AI agents. An entire. New. F*ing. Economy. This is because humans previously needed to design restrictive workflows to automate tasks using computers. If something was to be automated, it needed to be predicted, and then you needed to design different workflows and different decision points for each and every different situation.
Automation is still very valuable, but when you can’t predict the exact workflow, it becomes impossible. When you want to build software that caters to a giant number of potential scenarios… You. Need. Agents!
Now imagine a Master Orchestrator AI with access to thousands and thousands of agents that can do things on the Master’s behalf. An army of agents that are hyper-specialized beasts at certain tasks and can interact with all the apps that already exist out there. The potential is limitless.
Servers will be running 24/7 and agents will be requesting and routing resources to solve problems like there’s no tomorrow. Internet and technology usage is only set to increase. New medicine will be made. Research will be scaled. Digital universes will be built.
This will lead to productivity at unprecedented scales. Imagine a computer you just leave running 24/7 with instructions like:
“Collect comprehensive summaries of 1000 PhD papers on how to best learn programming and then create Canva notecards of each to post on my X account. Then, every day, use these principles to design software that will help me create viral posts, publish the posts, and use metrics like likes & comments to improve the quality of the software.” The possibilities are literally infinite.
Programming with Agents
Something else that I’m finding extraordinary is the ability to program with LLMs. You no longer need to memorize so many new libraries. You no longer need to understand exactly how systems operate if you’re building prototypes. Now, if you understand the fundamentals of computing — that each piece of software is a component, with subcomponents, that has a set of functions that can be combined to create an outcome — then you can build apps yourself. That’s right, yourself.
Software = components + subcomponents + data + logic + interfaces
All you have to do is remember that computers are machines that store, modify, and communicate data. Data is stored in databases you can’t see. Logic is the key element that dictates how data is manipulated on the backend. User interfaces are the way we interact with information.
Usually, with the latest tools, you’re now able to just let AI code by itself, and reason, and build things for you… and it will do crazy crazy stuff. It just builds… and builds… and builds…
A quick recommendation here: first make sure that you design a plan for the LLM to follow. This will give your idea real legs. Then, make sure that the AI creates one feature at a time, and make sure that you are checking the code as you go.
Write good tests. And of course… separate logic from the presentation layer. In this era of infinite creativity, this will enable you to build extraordinary interfaces around the core data you are manipulating. If you’re not sure what any of that means, go paste this post into an LLM. It will explain it.
Sign up for Acorns if you want to round up your credit card swipes and have millions of dollars in a few years.
On Writing
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
— Stephen King, On Writing
I’ll give you some more interesting information. I hate using AI to write. It ruins me. Why? Because I feel that it does all the damn work for me. It’s ridiculous. I hate it. I like using it to do research and answer questions and find information quickly and get answers to wild, bizarre, scintillating questions… but for actual writing… it completely kills my thought process… and everything feels sticky and too perfect and not crafted for the human mind.
Maybe this will get better over time or maybe I need to take a different approach to harnessing it…. but for now… AI… let me do the damn writing. You worry about processing the vast universe of information in front of you to refine my knowledge.
NOW… the question becomes… what the heck will you build? I wanna build things that benefit the planet. I want to architect forests. I want peace. I want to reduce wildfires. I just wanna chill.