Build Something Agents Want
"Build something users want" was the rule for 20 years. The user just changed.
“Build something users want.”
It’s been the rule for twenty years. The whole Lean Startup method is built around it. It’s still a good rule. But it quietly assumes something that’s starting to become untrue - that the user is a person.
If most software is consumed by agents, not humans, the experience that matters is the one an AI can parse, not the one a human finds delightful.
Think about what that actually means. No onboarding flow. No tooltips. No “aha moment” engineered for a person in their first three minutes. Agents don’t get frustrated. They don’t churn because the UI confused them. They read your API docs at 3am and don’t complain.
The product question is shifting from “would a user love this?” to “would an agent use this?” The companies that figure out what agents actually need - reliable outputs, clean inputs, composable functions - are building the infrastructure of the next decade.
Meanwhile, the one person who can direct those agents brilliantly starts to be worth ten engineers. Soon more.
We already saw this in music. Once distribution got infinite, the middle didn’t just struggle. It collapsed. You either broke through to the top or you made music for the love of it. The middle-income musician basically stopped existing.
The same thing is starting to happen to software. Average technical skill gets commoditized fast. The top fraction gets leverage no human engineer has ever had - and gets paid accordingly. The salary curve for technical work is going to look exponential in a way it never has before.
Three things are converging at once: agents are becoming the primary consumer of software, humans exceptionally skilled at directing those agents capture most of the value, and the gap between them and everyone else is widening faster than feels comfortable.
The rule hasn’t changed. Know your user. It’s just that the user changed.
🙏
Be kind,
Manuel