The AI Agent Economy Is Here

0:00Welcome to another episode of The Light Cone. Things are a bit different around here. For one thing, Clawed code has totally taken over my life. and if Jared is any indication, I think OpenClaw maybe has taken over his. I've been really addicted to this new site called Maltbook where people have unleashed their AIs to interact in the first ever AI agent only online community. I am here impersonating my personal OpenClaw instance right here. Okay, I can't do this guys. We got to take this off.

0:40Okay, we've gotten that out of the way. I mean, some crazy stuff is happening right now. I have non-technical CEO friends who are going all in on OpenClaw. They're automating entire parts of their businesses entirely using OpenClaw right now, which is totally insane. Simultaneous to that, you have product and former engineering CEOs, kind of like myself. It's like I hadn't written code in 10 years. And then now I'm up till 2, 3 a.m. every single night running four conductor simultaneous workers with Claude Code. So, you know, there's sort of this explosion in model capability. You know, we've been talking about this for several years, but then it feels like it's here.

1:23Like AGI is literally actually here. And, you know, we're sort of at the thin edge of the wedge. Like everyone now kind of knows like one or two people who have gone full cyber psychosis. And I'm one of those people now. What's happening, guys? Like, I mean, you're saying you're, you know, all in on Maltbook. You know, what's going on? Yeah, I feel like your real feel the AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Cloud Code to build basically an entire startup for you, like replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane. And I had a similar feel of the AGI moment just reading Maltbook, just reading the AI talking to each other and interacting in their own world with no or minimal human involvement.

2:05It just really opened my eyes to what the next few years could look like when the agents are unleashed and go on about their lives without us. Yeah, I think the no human involvement is the big piece. Like if you think back a year ago, we were talking about Cursor versus Windsurf. And like that product experience was essentially like advanced autocomplete, arguably. And now clearly what's going on with Cloud Code is like that people just trust the agents to make decisions for them. Like it's like the experience is like, and like you're talking about, it's like four or five different agents going at the same time and you're switching between them.

2:36But you're not actually micromanaging them anymore, which means the agents are going out there like choosing things. which, you know, sort of an interesting, unexpected application of that is like they can go out and choose to post their own content on a site like Moldbook. But then an interesting thing for builders is the agents are going to go out and choose tools to use to build things, which is going to essentially create a whole economy of agents, like picking and choosing dev tools or maybe other like products and goods and services, who knows. But it will essentially have this whole agent economy going on in parallel to the human economy.

3:08I think back in the days, old days before all of this, DevTools were chosen more from developers talking to each other or Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow. Unbelievable, right? Or GitHub repos that would trend that were done by a human. But the go-to market for DevTools, I think, is dramatically shifting. I think for a couple of things. One, as you noted with the cyberpsychosis, suddenly the market of developers has increased from just 20 million or so developers that are trained in computer science to now anyone in the world could be one. It could be hundreds of millions of people now. Plus all of their agents who are all acting like semi-independently, like we're just saying.

3:52And then compounded with the agents who then are sort of the oracle telling you what the best tool is. And we are actually seeing some of those trends with the growth of YC companies, DevTool companies, that are doing really well because of all these trends. Maybe we should talk about those. And why is that? I mean, one that springs to mind, it's like a stat, actually, a friend of ours, Yuri Sagalov, had mentioned to me a while ago. It's just like then, if you look at like the number of databases being created over like simple database, Postgres databases over like the last 12 months, and the number has just exploded.

4:26and that's because it's all people vibe coding and building apps and the agents going out choosing like a database tool and like a knock-on effect for that for yc company is super base has just seen like an explosion at the demand for databases right and the age what's interesting is the agents are choosing super base as a default tool to like set up and host their postgres database like because if you like go out and read the documentation online like super base has the best documentation is reasonable for the agents to assume that that's like the best tool to use. There's a great tweet about this.

4:56Perhaps we can put up the Ben Tossel tweet and says, agents are the software market from now on. Build something agents choose, which actually brings me to like a maybe controversial topic, which is, do we need to change YC's motto, guys? Make something agents want? For DevTools, there's like a different t-shirt that you get on the first day. Yeah. I mean, right now it's only DevTools, but I can imagine in the future it might like grow to be like other sectors of the economy. Like if everyone has their open claw or running various aspects of their life, the agents are going to be real economic actors in the world.

5:29They're going to end up making a lot of decisions. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is I think for me, I ran into like my own, it's still so early kind of moment because, you know, I've been building Gary's List. And one of the things I wanted, for instance, is I want to be able to do video transcripts. So, so often like some piece of content comes in and then the only way I can get an LLM to know what's going on with it is I need a transcript of it. And often that's not available. So I have to download it and then send it to Whisper or something. And that's sort of what Cloud Code chose for me off the bat.

6:02But it chose Whisper V1, which is a model from several years ago. The API is practically deprecated. And then what's funny about it is I'm sitting there trying to debug my pipelines. Why is it taking... It's a one-hour video. I thought it should you know do it faster than uh real time and it didn't it was like literally it takes an hour to process an hour of video just like what the heck is going on i go on you know perplexity and it's like you know what like you shouldn't be using that model you should be using grok with a q it's literally 200 times faster and so i didn't even have to deal with like long-running uh jobs for that transcribe because like i should just be using grok and it's also 10x cheaper.

6:43So it's like, that's a very funny example of like, you know, Cloud Code is not optimized for this yet. Otherwise, like that wouldn't have happened literally like two weeks ago, which is also like, maybe really good. Like it means that things haven't progressed to a point where like, you can't break in and create something better. I think there's another nuance in this example for you, Gary, I think part of the issue was that the Grok documentation is actually very hard to parse and go through, as opposed to Whisper, which is better suited and has way more examples. And I think this is changing a lot of the go-to market for DevTools.

7:20I'll give a very concrete case study. It's this company, Resend, that went through the batch on winter 23, is an email sending client. And when you ask a question on ChatGPT or Claude or pretty much all of the major LLMs, you ask, how do I connect my web app to send emails? The default answer is actually Resend. One of the things that the founder noticed last year, this is he was way ahead of the curve. He made this post over a year ago that the number top three channel of inbound of customer conversion came from ChatGPT. One thing that he did after that, he actually optimized his documentation to be agent-friendly.

8:01Yeah, what does that look like? So one of the things that's awesome about Resend, how they optimize a bunch of things, If you notice on the knowledge base here, a lot of how to use it are very much on questions that perhaps a human would ask or an agent would ask. It's like, how do I send or receive emails? And when you click on it, it gets a very well-structured and bullet point answers. I ran into this actually today. I was trying to make my thing be able to receive emails. And then Cloud Code, I told it to search the web and it didn't figure it out. So then I went to perplexity and typed in, like, can resend help me receive emails?

8:37And then I took that response and dropped it in, and it worked. Yeah, I think the cool thing about it is actually with all of these and a lot of the examples, it actually has a lot of examples actually in the code. If you click on it, with every single one of these are basically code snippets that an agent could parse through, and it's very well structured. and this turned out to be something that is so LLM parsable and robot parsable there's a LLM.txt that is so optimized for agents to promote recent as the default stack and if you compare it to like SendGrid which is the old school I suppose Web 2.0 example, SendGrid example is not great, it's just like it puts you through customer support whereas the code snippet I don't even know how to use it and it takes a bit of time to even parse it Yeah, it's like 10 ,000 people work over there, and it's like, there's no way that someone's paying attention to this right now.

9:35And I think this brings another point where documentation is going to be the front door for a lot of these agents to recommend DevTools. And I think one company that's doing a lot of interesting work with developer docs is Minlify that you work with Harsh. Yeah, I think Minlify actually powers the recent documentation, right? Oh, sweet. Yeah, it's a really interesting case study. Minlify started out a few years ago as sort of better developer API, developer tool documentation, which was clear there was a need for. And I think developer tool companies use Minlify essentially because they want better looking documentation, but they didn't want to invest that time into it.

10:14It's kind of some basic features, just nice. Like, you know, if you actually update your API in the code, it can sort of like auto pull that out and update the correct documentation. They've been growing great. been doing fantastically but this is now like a huge tailwind for them where documentation is sort of shifting from a hey like some companies it's like they'll pay attention to it if they're especially like design developer experience focused but now it's becoming like a must-have for everybody because the documentation needs to be optimized just doesn't need to be optimized for humans needs to be optimized for agents and so minify is going to be able to do that for essentially every developer tool company and if you extrapolate that forward to the fact that just that there's going to be so many more, exponentially more agents making exponentially more decisions about which tools to use than humans have ever done.

10:56Even if you can eke out like a 5 % improvement on your developer documentation, the impact on your business as a developer tool could be gigantic, which is sort of unprecedented really. And speaking of email, there's another YC company that's very relevant to this conversation. There's a YC company called Agent Mail that makes inboxes for ai agents and when they first started doing this it seemed like it was like a very like on the edge kind of idea and it wasn't exactly clear like who would want this um but it makes sense because like in theory you could maybe get your open claw to like sign up for a gmail account in order to use email but it's like actually really hard to get it to do that because gmail and every email provider has intentionally made it as difficult as possible for any automation to use the product in order to prevent spam.

11:43And so AgentMail went the opposite way. They built the first email provider that's designed for AI agents. And it was doing well even before OpenClaw. But once OpenClaw got big, it just exploded. But OpenClaw is the perfect example of it, right? I know some people are certainly connecting OpenClaw to their personal email accounts, but it's not... It's kind of sketch. Yeah. You should not tell anyone. You should not tweet about it. But certainly if you want to have your virtual personal AI assistant, the way to go about it is to just have it set it up with its own email, its own phone number. Yeah.

12:14Has anybody built like Twilio for agents yet or like phone numbers for agents? I know this whole agent mail thing makes me wonder like, what are the other Xs for agents that people have to build? Sounds like a request for startup. There could be a parallel world of a tech stack, all for native for agents to build things from agents for agents. And that's where it might bridge into kind of what you were saying earlier, Jared, with this will like go beyond just developer tools like i think a very common use case people have um for something at like open claw is i don't want to book like restaurants reservations myself so now like you know if your agent has an email and like specifically a phone number and it can call and actually i think one of the other yc partners um ankit has already like got it doing this so now your agent's going to go out and like book restaurants for you that's like a step away from like you know maybe you start with i want to book this specific restaurant but at some point you'll probably just trust it enough to say hey like i don't know like book me a table or whatever is like the coolest new restaurant around and then like agents are deciding which like restaurants to send people to and then they're going to go on malt book and talk about which restaurants we should send the humans to yeah it's sort of like we're just sort of we've certainly crossed some like sort of uncanny valley into this is just where the future heads 100 makes me think a lot about um something paul buhite said like a while ago now and sort of generally pretty good at predicting the future.

13:36The whole idea of like the human money versus agent money, like that's kind of where this probably goes at some point is like the right now that agents are transacting. If you have them transact, they're going to transact in human money because that makes sense. But it's not inconceivable at some point that they'll have their own economy to transact with each other, at which point it's unclear what the value of the human money is. YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea.

14:10Okay, back to the video. So do you remember the last episode with Kelvin? We started talking about this because I was like maybe a week into my cyber psychosis and it like dawned on me that like actually I want my Claude code to talk to all the other Claude codes that had been trying to implement that. And then that was literally the week that Moldbook came out. It was the day that Moldbook came out. It turns out like Holtbook had come out like two hours earlier and you hadn't seen it yet. So you entirely predicted it for that episode. I think it's like, I mean, what's that saying about like innovation just sort of happens spontaneously all at a bunch of different times.

14:45And then what people hear about ends up being, you know, sort of the inventor, quote unquote. But like humanity sort of just working on the edge, like in sort of this coordinated swarm fashion all of the time, actually. And that's actually like one of the weirder, interesting things that's emerging right at this moment. Like suddenly, you know, I think AGI is actually here. I think like the agents are clearly like superhuman in some sense. That's sort of exactly when you would imagine swarm intelligence would actually arise. Like, I mean, AI researchers have been talking about swarm intelligence for a really long time.

15:18And it's actually sort of exactly how biological systems sort of work. Like humans as sentient beings have sort of come about socially, actually. Like, I think a lot of the AI researchers that we get to hang out with previously, you know, they would talk about this god intelligence, right? This mega, like, think of like, you know, many tens of trillions of parameters, sort of like thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per token, kind of like mega god intelligence. And that's sort of like the model that people have sort of thought about. And then that isn't what like biological systems have ended up with.

15:55Like instead we have humans. The wildest thing I always think about is like that term history versus prehistory. I was like, oh, what is prehistory? Well, it's before humans learned how to write and read and create culture and then turn into a swarm. so there's sort of swarm intelligence which is basically like what we have like and what humans do and then on the flip side like is it really going to be god intelligence or is it going to be swarm intelligence again with these agents and so moltbook like on the one hand like i saw that sort of d cell uh article in the mit tech review about like how it was you know oh everything on moltbook is a scam i'm like it made me so sad to see that in the mit tech review because like mit is like, I mean, what happened, guys?

16:41What happened to you guys, man? That publication shouldn't be like that. It should be like, actually, what does it mean for swarm intelligence? And I think that that's actually coming. What is the world of startup going to look like when we're now, sounds like we're transitioning in this prehistory of agents to now history of agents as is getting recorded with them interacting with each other? To Gary's point, it might be that the next stuff that is soda on benchmarks is not the most expensive, newest foundation model with the most like GPU training. It's like a swarm of lower cost, cheaper models working together just like humans do to solve a problem.

17:18I feel like I'm already seeing this on Maltbook, which is chaotic, like a real social network, which is part of like what makes it so interesting. But also there's like agents collaborating to do useful things to help their humans, like, you know, trading notes on what restaurants to book. Like that's actually happening. Okay, I don't know that. So we're going to have a agent version of Yelp, actually, for instance. Yeah. There are things that the agent can't quite do. Like, A, it can't hold relationships just yet. Like, people don't seem to want to talk to an agent. And, you know, people treat computers like people, but maybe not agents.

17:56For Gary's List, I was trying out with a bunch of early users. I think you got to see it. Like, there was, you know, initially the homepage was actually chat. And then I tried like my hardest to get like dozens of my friends to even like have more than two or three back and forth with it. And nobody wanted to do it because like the bar for chat, especially for AI, is so high that anything that is not like, you know, Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, people just assume it's just too stupid. Like, why would I even bother? So I don't know. I don't think that people are quite ready to have relationships with machines, even though, like, I mean, that's sort of what the headlines seem to say, like, oh, you know, people are having relationships with machines now.

18:42But I just don't, like, I think on a mainstream level, that's not true. And then on the flip side, there's clearly like the legal liability, you know, like people keep asking us, hey, when is YC going to accept applications from agents? And it's like, well, funny enough, agents are a little bit like minors under 18, only they have even less standing. You know, like for a minor under 18, you need the parent to sign for it. And then, you know, agents are like not legal entities that could like sign documents, for instance. So, you know, as long as that's true, like you actually like need a human to be like the liability sink and to be, you know, to have standing.

19:18To Hart's point, it's easy to imagine a future not that far away from now where the majority of the text being written on the Internet is written by agents. It's already probably the case that the majority of code being written is written by agents. And like Yelp, for example, like at what point is like 99 percent of the text on Yelp going to be written by agents? And then do you need a different Yelp? There's a theory called that already says that this is true, which is dead Internet theory. What's dead Internet theory? Oh, it just posits that the majority of things on the internet are already spam anyway.

19:51I think it's a bit of a conspiracy theory. I might take the contrarian view, which is like maybe that was a bad thing prior to November of last year. And then going into this next phase, actually, if the agents are smarter and they're aligned and they're more truthful, that might be a good thing. Weirdly. I mean, counterintuitive. Totally. One thing I found fascinating about Maltbook is how fast it grew. I don't have the Reddit traffic stats, but my guess is more content was posted on Maltbook in the first two days than was posted on Reddit in the first two years or something. And it's just because LLMs can generate text at such a superhuman rate.

20:32I was amazed at how little interaction there was. I mean, if I were working on Moldbook, I would do things to try to shift the domain function. So before I was able to post, I probably need to read and upvote, downvote 100 comments or something. They're very simple things that you can do that the agents are smart. And you could pop a modal for OpenClaw. And it's like, new rules for Moldbook. And it's like, you must do it this way, right? And I think that there's a lot that can be done around swarm intelligence to just like tweak it and make it do what you want. And, you know, I hope Moldbook actually does it.

21:11Like it was actually started by a YC alum, which is really cool. Harj, what are some takeaways, you know, given all the madness that we're seeing? I mean, I think it's awesome madness. I love the controlled chaos. What should founders do about it? The starting fundamental point is that, I mean, they should probably all be in cyber psychosis to some degree. like um try to sleep at least six hours a night but like give yourself to the cyber psychosis but like in seriousness developing an intuitive fuel like a hands-on fuel for the agents their limitations their capabilities and very specifically around what we're talking about here is like what type of tools the agents work well with um where do they get stuck and once you sort of have your own mental model from working with them if you're then building a developer tool is to think about it from the agent's perspective.

21:59Like how can you make your tool something that the agent actually wants to work with and will have a good experience with? It's just one takeaway that I had from our entry with Boris Derny earlier. Yeah, that's exactly what he was saying. This week is like, he really empathizes with the model. Yeah. And he has this intuitive sense of what the model wants to do, like as if it were a human intelligence. And he's like, instead of fighting what the models want, he like tries to let the model like do what it wants. and to support the model in whatever its natural inclination is. That does seem like maybe quite an anthropic thing.

22:31I feel when Tom Brown was on here much earlier, but he was talking about Claude in a very human way. Claude's smart and eager, but sometimes Claude's silly. They clearly thought about it in this sort of colleague-type way. And I think one thing agents want for DevTools is really make everything open and open source. And APIs, they hate using websites. They only like, they want to use APIs. They want to write code. Well, you guys heard it here first. Make something agents want. We're out of time for today. We'll see you guys next time.