Agents, Hype & Hard Truths
Everyone's building AI tools. But who's really thinking?
The Age of the Agent is Here & It’s wild out there.
Microsoft, OpenAI, Google… they’ve all fired the starting gun on a new kind of race.
Microsoft’s Copilot stack basically lets you code, test, and deploy without ever leaving your IDE.
OpenAI dropped Operator and the GPT Store.. suddenly anyone can spin up a micro-startup over the weekend.
And Google? They’re rolling out agent protocols like A2A and Mariner that let AI run full-blown workflows across platforms… no humans needed.
And for a while, I got caught up in it too. I tried a bunch of these tools.
Felt that fleeting god-mode high:
“I don’t need engineers. I’ll build everything myself. Just me, some APIs, and a Stripe link.”
It felt dangerous in the best way. Like I was cheating the system.
But then the reality hit:
If everyone’s building… who’s left to use?
If I’m the builder, the user, the support team, and the ops guy…
Did I just create a business?
Or give myself a never-ending job?
The Builder Paradox
We’ve all seen the headlines:
A solo dev hits $1.6M ARR with no employees.
Character.AI goes from two founders to a $1B valuation.
Midjourney scales to $200M ARR with a team you can count on your fingers.
And yeah… those stories are cool.
But they’re also… misleading.
They don’t show what happens after the dopamine wears off.
Like:
Who rewrites your tool when OpenAI changes its API schema overnight?
Who handles it when your agent spits out a hallucination and misleads a customer?
Who deals with feature creep, bug fixes, support tickets, downtime?
If it’s all you… are you really building leverage?
Or just scaling burnout?
I get it.. internal tools for big teams make sense.
They’ve got the people and processes to absorb the mess.
But what about the rest of the world?
80% of the market is SMEs. Consultants. Scrappy startups.
They don’t need wrappers.
They need reliability.
There’s no agent for that.
Even if you build one, guess what?
You’re now in the business of updating it every time something upstream breaks.
And that’s the real problem:
We’re not building systems. We’re chasing templates.
We’re not shipping solutions. We’re packaging demos.
We don’t need another AI-native “Notion for X.”
We need judgment. Craft. Real thinking.
The Shakeout is Coming
Here’s what I predict happens next:
In the next 6–12 months, we’ll start seeing standardization.
Agents will be built on the same 4–5 protocols. Everyone will be using the same stacks.
AutoGen, A2A, MCP, MiddleFinger 🤣, FancyAcronym, etc.
And just like websites, the excitement will wear off.
But OpenAI? They’ll still be making money.. because they own the rails.
Meanwhile, a lot of solo builders will burn out.
Why?
Because they built wrappers, not products.
Chased virality, not usage.
Shipped fast, but never went deep.
And the few who did think long-term?
Who built around real workflows.
Who made their stuff extensible, reliable, not just shiny?
They’ll quietly start pulling ahead.
This isn’t about pessimism or optimism.
It’s about clarity.
We’ve made it easier than ever to build.
But harder than ever to think.
OpenAI Isn’t Playing the Same Game
While everyone’s chasing flashy demos and UI sugar…
OpenAI is building the plumbing.
They’re:
Partnering with national labs on climate modeling and nuclear research.
Building Stargate… a $100B+ AI infrastructure project.
Moving toward APIs-as-infra: Custom GPTs, secure function calling, enterprise-grade controls.
They’re not vibing.
They’re laying foundation.
And that makes me pause.
Because if they’re thinking long-term…
Shouldn’t we be, too?
What Comes Next?
Let me say this as simply as I can:
We don’t need more AI products. We need better frameworks for using them.
We need:
Deeper systems thinking
Real upgrade paths
Actual value chains.. not just viral moments
So…
Don’t clone what’s hot.
Don’t build wrappers you can’t maintain.
Don’t confuse shipping with scaling.
Because this wave of AI?
It won’t reward those who move fast and copy hard.
It’ll reward those who move smart, think long, and build deep.
Let’s be in that 5%.