Preface
I’m not a historian and not an expert in neural networks. I am an engineer and maybe a self-proclaimed technologist. This is all based on my lived experiences, by observing and using these technologies in my day-to-day. I’m writing this for my own self-reflection and to capture my thoughts around Agentic AI at this point in history. I’ll be interested to revisit this in a year or two and see how my feelings have changed.
Offline
Growing up, I was interested in technology from an early age. We had a computer in our house for at least a good portion of my life. My dad had a co-worker who tinkered on PCs, and he purchased a PC from him, for us to use. The first one, that I can remember, was a I486SX machine that ran at 33MHz. 5ΒΌ" floppy bay, no network, a miniscule amount (by today’s standards) of RAM and HDD space; it was my first computer.
I find it pretty amazing that I’ve been alive to see some truly transformational technologies be realized into everyday life. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of all the technologies in the last 41 years. I’m sure there are thousands of examples that could fit into this list. Things like lithium ion batteries, mRNA vaccines, LED lighting, GPS, clean power at scale, and many more have all been extremely impactful to everyday life of everyone across the planet.
Networked
Gaining internet access was an incredibly formative experience. As a teenager, the ability to communicate with friends instantly, at any hour, felt revolutionary. Our family’s encyclopedia set became obsolete overnight (though Encarta ‘96 had already begun that shift). Music could be “found” without having to go buy a CD. Eventhough the process of connecting and searching was primitive, compared to today, it was clear that this technology was going to get faster, better, and easier to use with time.
As time went on, access speed increased. More websites came online. More choices for email (beyond just your ISP) became available. New backend/frontend technologies became available, enabling dynamic experiences on the web. Sites like Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Wikipedia and Amazon all enabled people to connect, shop and learn like no other time in history.
For me, this was all happening between my mid-teen years to my entry into college. For some, I’m sure it was a significant shift in how they interacted with the world. For me, it felt like a natural transition into existing in a more modern world.
Mobile
Society saw there was value in being able to access the internet outside of a hardline connection. cell networks were starting to evolve in the early 2000s and could provide some low-bandwidth data functionality. Bberry, Palm and other handheld PDA devices were filling this gap. However, they were expensive, slow and didn’t seem to appeal to a mass-market.
In January 2007, Steve Jobs stood on-stage (while the engineers sat in the 5th row drinking scotch) and revealed, the iPhone.
The following year, HTC entered the space with the HTC Dream and Apple released the iPhone 3G. These devices, which introduced the mainstream to mobile internet, opened up a whole new set of way to entertain ourselves, communicate with each other and interact with the world.
Services that already existed in the more traditional web, like Facebook, Pandora, Google and Youtube, quickly made themselves available on these devices. Some at first via web browser interfaces, but quickly pivoting to native apps. (It’s wild to think the original iPhone didn’t launch with an app store).
Having access to all of internet in your pocket felt like something right out of science fiction. Even being in my 20s, it really did feel like a huge jump in our capabilities as a society. No longer could you be in a conversation and just make up nonsense and not be fact-checked. New services were created that allowed for things like ride sharing, personal shoppers and food delivery. The gig economy was very much enabled by smartphones. Other, more traditional industries, were also transformed. Event tickets, online shopping and person-to-person or retail payments all saw major changes in how they were done. Public safety also has improved, as alerts could be sent out en masse for weather or other public safety concern. Gone are the days of being glued to a TV or radio during the possibility of severe weather.
There’s a whole new creator economy that has sprung up, albeit more recently, around short-form ephemeral content. All of this enabled by the internet connected computer in our hands.
Agentic Intelligence: enabled
In 2026, generative AI services have literally exploded into the world, and the world will never be the same.
Right off the bat, I want to state that I don’t support companies destroying the world we live in just for the sake of profits. Generative AI has a lot of stigma around it, for a lot of different reasons. I believe that responsible development and use of technology can be done, if it is mandated. The training data can be ethically sourced and we don’t have to cause irreparable harm to the environment. This might involve having the federal government actually do something, instead of just allowing the tech oligarchs to do whatever they want.
There were indications in 2023 that the GPT3.5 and GPT4 models were providing some interesting uses. Generation of small text snippets was novel and provided some use. They could do some simple proofreading or rewriting. If you asked these models to produce a recipe for cupcakes, often times it could look plausible, but might have significantly wrong ratios of ingredients. They were unreliable for asking certain questions and not useful for current happenings, as they lacked current information in the training data set. At this point, asking to models to produce code would sometimes result in something useful, but sometimes not. They were fun to play with, but not all that interesting. At best, maybe better autocomplete than Intellisense was doing at the time.
During this time, image classifiers were starting to get better and better, along with diffusion models. Models were being trained on how to use tools. Multimodal models were in development, which would allow for more capability than the current LLMs had. Along with the concept of Agentic AI, all of this was about to change the way people interact with these tools in a big way.
I remember having the conversation with a friend, and saying I was really excited at the prospect of agents being able to perform tasks for me. Things like, placing a grocery order for pickup or waiting in a virtual line and buy concert tickets. Strangely, I really hadn’t thought a whole lot about it in the context of developing software. It totally makes sense though, agents building out functionality in code, writing tests, validating it. Now, they can literally take idea to completed project, with some guidance. There’s certainly still some shortcomings, and developers should still ultimately be held responsible for the code they develop, but the models are getting damn close to being an expert in software engineering.
Gen AI has fully penetrated the SWE domain, and I think over the course of the next year or so we’ll see other domains that will quickly adopt the technology in the same way. This is outside the very “obvious” uses of “Customer Service Agents” and “Administrative Work”. The jobs of Marketers and Voice Actors are, to some degree, in jeopardy. There’s certainly uses for these tools to enable people to work, create and build in ways like never before, but also the possibility that the humans are cut out of the loop all together.
We’re now past the point where LLMs are unreliable most of the time. I would venture to guess, more people are turning to AI models for even things as simple as a web search. The tools often are faster feeling than a traditional websearch. Who wants to comb through a bunch of web pages, searching through tons of text, when an agent can just do it for you. I think it is still worth checking the sources that the tools are using to forumlate their results, especially if the answer you are seeking will change your actions significantly. Sometimes they still do get it wrong.
However, today is the worst these technologies will ever be… so they only stand to get better.
The genie really is out of the bottle now, and there’s no putting it back in.
The future…
As I sit here, right after my 41st birthday, reflecting on and writing about tech, it’s both astonishing and terrifying.
These tools have permeated my everyday life. I like to believe they’ve been significantly helpful. I can’t deny I’ve a sense of concern around data privacy and the ill effects of the technology on society broadly.
I’m not new to technology upending the way we do things. Technology as a forcing function has been something I’ve been receptive to for a long time. This does feel a bit different though. Not just because there are books about AGI like “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” or people online that are so opposed to AI they screech that everything is Gen AI without any real knowledge about how to separate the nuances around the technology. This feels different because of how incredibly fast it permeated so many spaces. The changes have been significant to spaces where the tools have been deployed. The closet analogs that I have come up with are the step functions in technology that I’ve written about above.
I think I should more often reflect on the question: “If it all went away tomorrow, would I still be able to do my job? Could I still find answers to questions on my own? Could I still force myself to think critically about problems and how to solve them?”. There’s a video on X.com that talks about students failing to think critically (backup link). I think this could become a real problem without an easy solution. AI can help people avoid learning how to think critically, because they just expect to offload the thinking part to the technology, which feeds them the answers. I hope this is just part of the journey on learning how to use these tools.
I’m optimistic about the future. I think Agentic AI opens more doors for people to build, create and learn about things, more than any other time in history. Individuals will likely be able to start businesses and create products that would have taken many more people in the past. I’m hopeful that these tools will allow medical research to happen at a quicker pace and diagnoses be faster and accurate. I’m hopeful that the mundane tasks that Agentic AI can easily automate can free people up for things they want to do instead. I think cooperation between technology leaders and governments who have the best intrest of the people in mind, can develop governance around these technologies that allow them to help people, without significant harm to anyone or anything. I truly hope that the proliferation of Agentic AI will bring about a better future.