Around 1900, American factories started replacing their steam engines with electric motors.
Funny enough, economists later found it took ~30 years for electricity to show up in productivity numbers. Not because the technology didn't work. Because the building was still shaped like its old power source.
The gains arrived when a new generation rebuilt the factory floor around small motors: one per machine, arranged around the flow of work instead of the shaft.
@ArmanHezarkhani and I keep circling a question that gets at a similar idea: what do products look like when the primary user is an agent and the human comes second?
It is hard because every form factor we own, the computer, the phone, the app, was built human-first.
- Screens exist to translate machine state into something eyes can parse.
- Buttons exist to translate intent into something machines can read.
- An interface is a translation layer between human senses and machine memory.
Agents do not need the translation.
They read the machine state directly. So when we watch an agent drive a cursor around a webpage today, we are watching the factory with the new motor bolted where the steam engine used to be.
It works. It is also a sign the building is shaped wrong for its new occupant.
The clearest way I have found to think about what comes next: product design stops being one surface and splits into three.
1) The intent surface. Human to agent.
How you express what you want. This surface is shrinking toward speech and glances, because stating intent takes a sentence, not a screen. The demand for big glass came from humans doing the manipulation themselves.
Move the manipulation to agents and the hardware can collapse into ears and pockets.
2) The execution surface. Agent to world.
Protocols, APIs, MCPs, tool registries.
Humans never see this layer, but it is where most of the product now lives. Today the API is a side door and the interface is the product. That inverts. The protocol becomes the front door, and the pretty interface becomes one optional rendering of it.
3) The verification surface. Agent to human.
How you check the work and feel safe approving it. I think this is the most underrated of the three. Trust is the bottleneck of the whole system. The products people love will be the ones that make "show me what my agent did" feel effortless: previews, diffs, undo.
Approval becomes the core gesture of computing, the way the click was for thirty years.