The Agents Are Among Us

I’ve been watching the launch of Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots somewhat… bemusedly, if you will. Being a regular Verge reader/listener, I am partial to Nilay Patel’s take that Silicon Valley’s “software brain” mentality has obscured both a lot of the actually practical uses of AI, and the unvarnished truth that the vast majority of people simply don’t care—or that they do care about the privacy and productivity impacts. Being too close to the coding agent madness (I am still poking at various agent harnesses, and feeling guilty about spending too much time yak shaving rather than actually using them for achieving more in other domains), I think that we’re at a weird plateau where: We definitely have far too many interpretations of what an agent harness is There is zero standardization on workflows (skills and MCP servers are still duking it out at both ends of the extensibility spectrum, but every user ends up creating their microcosm of weird little agent integrations) I feel we’re…