The Agent Economy
Introduced by: Pete Kaminski
Depth: Deep thread
About an hour in, Pete made a prediction that sparked a substantive back-and-forth: nobody's going to be using Claude Code directly in 12–18 months. The future is agents.
The Conversation
Pete set up the argument:
Pete: "What's gonna happen is... we're gonna start shipping agents, different people will ship different agents, and the agents just do things for you... All of the work that you're doing, some software development company or agent development company is just gonna compress all of that and say, here's the thing that does the thing."
He drew the parallel to the 1980s software industry:
Pete: "It's to me, a little bit like the software business in the 80s... except instead of applications from 1980, we're gonna have agents from 2027. 90% of the people are gonna be serviced by WordPress, Word, 123... 10% of the people are paying people like me and Heather."
Dave pushed back — not on the prediction, but on the completeness of it:
Dave: "There will always be people innovating, always will be people creating, people who want to work in private... they're gonna say, look, I have this tattoo business... super private stuff... I want to build this, and I don't want to use someone else's code."
Dave argued the real money would be in niche, high-value custom work:
Dave: "You're gonna be, like, the repair God... Plumber in a nuclear plant, power plant? Plumber in space, have a toilet that doesn't work. That's NASA, right?"
Where They Agreed
They "violently agreed" on the market structure:
- 90% commodity: Free or cheap agents from Facebook, Microsoft, etc. — monetizing user data
- 10% custom: People paying real money for bespoke agents from developers like Pete and Heather
- Future Dave: In 2 years, someone like Dave would buy most of his tools off the shelf, maybe hiring Pete for one "keystone" agent that makes everything else work
Pete: "You'd buy 50 years... and then you'll have, like, one or two where it's like, oh, I need to hire my brother Pete to build this one little Keystone one."
Dave: "By four agencies, yeah, exactly. They get cheaper, and I just buy more."
The Concern
Pete flagged that many free agents would be on someone else's leash:
Pete: "A lot of them are going to be getting free agents from Facebook and Microsoft and crap like that... the agent is going to basically be on Mark Zuckerberg's leash."
Related
- Freya — Pete's current agent, an early example of personalized AI
- Heather — Pete's potential business partner for building custom agents
- PKAI Course — where Pete is training people to work in this emerging economy
- Putting Claude on Rails — the methodology that makes agent-building possible