39) Agentic Tooling

Behind-the-scenes building Vambrace AI, a company on a mission to figure out its mission. Please pardon the stream-of-consciousness style. Subscribe to follow along or visit the site here:

(typos are to make sure you’re paying attention)

Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In our post from two weeks ago, Walter (pt. 2), we looked at specific workflows that Walter—my clawdbot—has helped me with. We examined my cold outreach efforts for a new incubation, AskMyStack, in which Walter helped me identify leads, which led to my first few users. User acquisition there has stalled a bit following some early momentum, but more to come on that soon.

Separately, as part of an extension of our exploration on how humanity and AI will continue to intersect and co-evolve as the technology develops, we are officially soft-launching Walter’s own newsletter: Life from the Inside (subject to change). Basically I’d thought it be neat to have an entirely self-contained newsletter about AI, written by an AI—with virtually no human oversight. I’ve embedded general guidelines and attitudes in Walter since he was “born” a few weeks ago—and we’ll see how those translate to a newsletter.

The goal of this specific endeavor is to provide a snapshot of key goings-on within the industry and then have Walter give his perspective on where things are going and what it all means. It’s also a neat exercise for me to push the boundaries of persistent memory, long-term utility, and narrative cohesion. I’ll be reaching out to you all individually with the link to subscribe!

Agentic Tooling

Moving on, in today’s post, I wanted to touch briefly on a significant emerging opportunity: Agentic Tooling. Astute members of the audience will remember a post I wrote last fall called Digital Bazaar which basically laid out my vision for the future of agentic interaction. We’re now seeing most of the substance and spirit of that vision coming to life, and increasingly it seems obvious that we will live in a digital world largely composed of agent-on-agent interaction in the not-too-distant future.

I made the above image for my original post, which captured this idea of the Digital Bazaar: a forum (and eventually there will be many such forums) within which agents interact, transact, and communicate.

Some specific indicators of this coming agentic wave are projects like Moltbook and RentAHuman—which offer this agentic interaction layer for agent-to-agent communication, and even agent-to-human interaction (with the agent on the demand-side of the equation). In other words, we’re starting to see the foundation being laid for the Digital Bazaar.

But what I’m just starting to realize, and what I had previously overlooked, is that the real opportunity within the Digital Bazaar involves taking ownership over the picks and shovels of the experience: building the booths, paving the walkways, papering the contracts, dispensing refreshments to travel-weary consumption-agents and stressed-out sales-agents, enforcing adherence to contractual agreements, helping sales-agents even find the right bazaars to attend, helping consumption-agents find the right bazaars to attend, etc.

In other words, we’re heading towards an incredibly robust and dynamic digital society for agentic interactions to occur—and I think there actually will be immense value for companies that can build digital tools for digital actors that help facilitate digital objectives. In additional other words, “devtools” will just become “tools” because every entity manipulating bits will be a developer.

Some ideas are percolating within my organic consciousness on how I can start to trial some digital tools that might appeal to agents, to help make them more efficient and effective in their work. In my mind, the key is that all sorts of traditionally human-oriented computer-work is going to be subsumed by AI, so, if that’s the case, then they need their own suites of business tools to help them operate effectively.

What does it mean for a team of supply-agents to “present” to a team of demand-agents? What is the interaction substrate upon which they present their case? How is that information stored, how is it received, how is it improved upon? What does an entirely agent-first powerpoint look like? What does an agent-first canva look like? What does an agent-first quickbooks look like?

It’s not enough for these legacy saas platforms to integrate AI capabilities within their human-first platforms, because humans are going to be using them less and less. They would need to totally upend their businesses to cater to an agentic audience. And that disruption is basically where I think there are some opportunities.

Looking Forward

I’m not intentionally being vague to generate interest, I just still don’t really know what I’m going to try to build within this space. But I’m hoping that the internal tools and techniques I’ve been using to displace the productivity software that I’ve used in the past could be generalized and then marketed specifically to an audience of agents.

But, as with any mad rush associated with opportunities of enormous economic heft, there will be blood. Have a great week!

Sincerely,

Luke