AI is moving very fast. Every few months something new appears that would have sounded impossible just a year ago.
This cartoon is my small contribution to that chaos.
A (slightly suspicious) joke!
I used to draw my own caricatures. But since I don’t really have the skill or motivation, I just let AI do it. This is the first one 😀
AI is coming like a storm and starting to take people’s chairs. I mean seriously. I’ve already heard three different cases from people close to me.
I might be the fourth one. Not the one losing a chair maybe, but the one hiring an AI agent to do the job. I hope I don’t have to.
In this post I just want to think out loud about the future of AI.
As programmers, maybe we’ll end up creating AI clones of ourselves as agents. We could tune these agents with the skills we already have. For example, I’ve been building online examination software for years, so my agent could become an an expert in that field.
In that case, maybe I wouldn’t need to work for a company as a paid developer anymore. I could just sell my agent to many companies at the same time.
Maybe we ourselves would become an item in an Agent Store, getting stars and comments 🙂
And not only programmers.
A DevOps engineer could create an agent for security and infrastructure.
A painter could create an agent that produces art in their own style.
A pediatrician could create a medical expert agent.
A psychologist could do the same.
But the more I think about it, the more radical the idea becomes.
Maybe what we sell in an Agent Store won’t actually be ourselves.
Maybe we will sell our skills.
Instead of selling hours of work, we might publish skill-based agents:
- an online examination expert agent
- a DevOps incident response agent
- a medical triage agent
- a legal document review agent
In other words, an Agent Store might actually become a skill marketplace.
That would be something new. Until now, human expertise didn’t scale well. One expert could only serve a limited number of people.
But an agent trained by that expert could potentially serve thousands.
Or millions.
Of course there is another question.
If an Agent Store ever exists, will independent experts really be able to compete there?
Or will the marketplace mostly be filled with agents from big tech companies with unlimited data and infrastructure?
I honestly don’t know.
But one thing feels increasingly possible:
Instead of working for companies,
we might end up publishing versions of our expertise.
And maybe the real question is not:
“Will AI take our jobs?”
But rather:
“Are we going to sell our skills in an Agent Store?”
What do you think?