Placeholder text. The final essay is still being written.

Every product roadmap I see this year has the word agent on it. Teams are building agents, naming agents and launching agents.

Ask the people who use these products what they want, and the word never comes up. They want the task done. They want to say what they need in plain words and get the result back.

A capability, not a product

Agents are real and we have to build them. But they are plumbing. Users will meet them the way they meet search indexes or sync engines: as features that quietly work.

Nobody asks for a better database. They ask for the thing to work. Agents are heading the same way.

What this means for design

The design problem is not how to present an agent. It is how to make the outcome trustworthy: what the person asked for, what was done, and how to undo it if it was wrong.