Today, software is primarily built for people to use (directly or indirectly). But it's very clear that there will be trillions of agents in the future, executing every type of task for us imaginable.
Agents will be deployed for coding, processing loans, reviewing insurance claims, executing financial transactions, acting as personal assistants, and every other known task in the economy. As a result, we're going to see a shift in who we have to increasingly build tools for.
So many new opportunities are rapidly emerging right for building for agents. Agents are going to need seamless identities across platforms. They're going to need file systems and databases to store off their work, sessions, and important data they're sharing. They're going to need tools for collaborating with people. They're going to need safe ways of spending or managing money. They're going to need computers to execute code and other tasks in. And so on.
In many cases, the tools and systems that the human users are already working with will be the natural tools for these agents to leverage. There are many areas where the highways have already been built, and agents will ride right on top of those.
In other cases, there will need to be new capabilities that emerge due to the scale and change in use-case that agents represent. In either case, these tools need to be API-first, as agents will leverage these tools like a developer or machine would have previously. CLIs/APIs are their native tongue.
The complex part is that building for agents introduces new challenges vs. building for people. They require far more oversight than people do, and they don't get the same right to privacy as people. They can't be held responsible for the work that they're doing, but rather the person that launches them into their task must be (for now). They don't quite know when they've run astray and can't execute the task at hand. These are just a small set of things that become the new complexities that need to be anticipated when building for agents.
We’re entering a completing new era of software development and infrastructure that will be built out. Wild times ahead.