[hakfoo]

Stupid thought: Maybe it's about scale.

Take that "sort of newspaper for breakfast reading" description and multiply that by 20 million MAU and you have the yahoo.com front page circa 1999, or the opening screen of the Reddit app circa 2020.

There are going to be a lot of tasks where if someone wired up some tools to do it for personal consumption, you'd call it agentic. Since there are a lot of overlapping interests, the obvious route is to have a handful of specialists building the tools and selling them as a packaged service to a broader consumer-type audience. While this will move away from the "a agent following your specific directives" narrative, since all you'll get is a few tunable knobs, it will also offer instant gratification and probably fewer footguns than trying to build your own.

This bodes poorly for a certain type of dev though. I suspect every shop of a certain size or larger now has at least one AI evnagelist building a bespoke "agentic" workflow that converts inbound support tickets to outbound CVEs. When you've got a brace of vendors all offering that as a COTS product, do you still want him? Firms like Atlassian and Github/lab might be in privileged positions for that storyline, because they already know all the secrets of the systems they're trying to instrument, and could potentially build API extensions to suit their needs.