Arjun Malhotra(@BadCapitalVC):some obvious & non-obvious reasons i think AI agents may not have really been widely adopted yet, even though the tech is ready: 1/ it's not prompt in, answer out. an agent is a process you set up and steer while it runs, and the chatbot muscle memory most people have doesn't transfer. 2/ prompting an agent is closer to writing a spec than asking a question. you have to scope the task extensively and define what "done" looks like. 3/ as @paraschopra puts it, this needs a lot of delegation, which is a hard soft skill to build. it's very close to managing an employee and most people have never done this. 4/ a lot of the actual power still lives inside codex or claude code which is terminal-shaped and a little technical. you have to be comfortable doing the messy setup, so it self-selects for a narrow crowd. 5/ one agent is also just a tool. the unlock is running several at once and getting them to talk to each other like a team, and that handoff between agents is still mostly diy. 6/ same problem across people. your agent's context has to reach your colleagues or everyone ends up working in silos, and right now that handoff is way too manual. 7/ trust is a ratchet. a chatbot that's wrong wastes 10 seconds, but an agent that's wrong sends the email or edits the file. the downside is asymmetric, so most people keep it on a short leash. 8/ lastly, there isn't a job-to-be-done the public actually feels yet. autonomous agents will always be a solution looking for a problem.

2026.08.06 07:12

some obvious & non-obvious reasons i think AI agents may not have really been widely adopted yet, even though the tech is ready: 1/ it's not prompt in, answer out. an agent is a process you set up and steer while it runs, and the chatbot muscle memory most people have doesn't transfer. 2/ prompting an agent is closer to writing a spec than asking a question. you have to scope the task extensively and define what "done" looks like. 3/ as @paraschopra puts it, this needs a lot of delegation, which is a hard soft skill to build. it's very close to managing an employee and most people have never done this. 4/ a lot of the actual power still lives inside codex or claude code which is terminal-shaped and a little technical. you have to be comfortable doing the messy setup, so it self-selects for a narrow crowd. 5/ one agent is also just a tool. the unlock is running several at once and getting them to talk to each other like a team, and that handoff between agents is still mostly diy. 6/ same problem across people. your agent's context has to reach your colleagues or everyone ends up working in silos, and right now that handoff is way too manual. 7/ trust is a ratchet. a chatbot that's wrong wastes 10 seconds, but an agent that's wrong sends the email or edits the file. the downside is asymmetric, so most people keep it on a short leash. 8/ lastly, there isn't a job-to-be-done the public actually feels yet. autonomous agents will always be a solution looking for a problem.

Josh Miller@joshm

2026.08.04 21:19

Hot take… isn’t it kinda crazy that nobody is really using AI Agents? I don’t mean software engineers or AI early adopters. I mean “college friends talking about it in group chat,” the feeling you got when everyone started using Instagram or TikTok. These frontier AI models are *insane* (as are the harnesses & tool calls & the like). And every large tech co has an AI agents platform, not to mention all the YC startups doing vertical agents. Yet all of your friends and family outside of tech — who spend all day staring at their iPhones and get paid to work in browser tabs — don’t really care or find themselves using any AI agents yet. Yes ChatGPT, Claude, etc. are extremely popular… but if you look at the engagement data the vast majority of people are still using these aI chat tools like a glorified Google + Grammarly. That’s why the AGI labs are all pushing desktop apps for Codex, Cowork, etc. so hard to non-technical ppl. And yes exceptions for lawyers and customer service but even those have some asterisks and exceptions to rule. Look I’m not saying the ChatGPT moment for AI Agents is not coming… it most definitely is! Remember we pivoted from Arc to Dia precisely because we believe computing is going to be radically reimagined around these AI primitives. No doubt. But that’s my point: it’s just so surprising it hasn’t happened yet because all of the tech you’d need is there. Again if you stop for a second and think about it… for all the press and money and hype and models and crazy ARR numbers… this “AI Agent” moment does not *feel* like the other breakthrough tech moments we’ve lived through (e.g. think the shift to Stories via Snapchat & Instagram, or shift to on-demand via Uber/Airbnb/Doordash). Which is a long way of saying: if you can figure out the answer to “why” most people don’t care about AI agents yet (and have no enduring interest in using them) — especially since the models and harnesses are here and ready — the answer to that question will allow you to capture a lot of marketshare and make a lot of money in 2027. Theoretically, the tech is ready for AI Agents to totally transform how we work and live our lives… but alas the general public dgaf… that’s the generational puzzle to solve for the next 12 months for anyone not working on the models themselves.

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