This year has been the year of agent tooling. Every week can feel like a complete revolution in software. It is not. People still face the same problems they have always faced. Rent. Time. A product that has to work for someone else. A life that has to feel livable. If that is not kept in view, time will be wasted chasing every bullshit fad that pops up on X.

Agentic tools let an experienced developer build almost anything very quickly. That sounds like winning. Then the next thought shows up. If anything can be built in an instant, why build this? Anyone else can build the same thing in a flash. The difficulty that used to make a project feel real is gone. Speed does not make the work matter. It just makes the pile possible solutions bigger. The noise only increases in the ecosystem because no solution is scarce even when implemented better than the next one.

The tools start eating themselves. A company that needed a hundred developers now needs ten people and some agents. Then five. The work still gets done. The extra people do not vanish. They open a laptop and generate things nobody asked for. Three.js games that nobody plays. Dashboards nobody opens, filled with data that is easier read in a md file. Another harness. A software factory whose purpose is to make more software... for more imaginary users.

That is the paradox in physical terms. The better the AI gets, the fewer people you need to build the real product. The leftover talent energy stays inside the collective and manufactures more meta stuff. Output by talented people goes up. The set of actual end users, outside the room, does not.

AI is real and useful. The problem is where most of the attention is going. It is getting carved into a bubble of recursive monoculture. Harness of harnesses. Cloud of clouds. Hypervisors for psudo-machines that store state so another agent can pretend it has a computer to make more agent tools, so developers can make more software for people making more tools for making hypervisors for fake vms... to make a space for agents to make more ...... and so on.. Meta product on top of meta product. It looks like a boom because the demos keep getting denser. Underneath, a lot of it is builders building for builders.

The question at the end of that loop is still the same question it was before the agents showed up. What are you even building? And for whom?

I do not think the answer is another layer of tooling. I think the answer is to accept how powerful this is and then point it at reality.

Reality is a person who does not live on GitHub. A job that was ignored because it was too messy, too local, too regulated, or too unfashionable for the default Silicon Valley story. Travel. Trades. Clinics. Schools. Language. Operations. The Tuesday problems. Organizations outside the bubble already have problems that software could touch and the new skill is creating scenarios in which these people are open to change. If the thing being built only makes sense to other people who are also making harnesses, you never left the bubble.

I think the key is to use the factory and not become it. The models will keep getting better either way across vendors. The only part that is controllable is whether the thing you ship works in the real world, for someone who does not think about how it was made.