Picture this: you’re a fisherman on open water. The sea is calm, the catch is steady, and you’ve learned the rhythms well enough to make a living. Then you notice something on the horizon. Other fishermen, the ones closer to it, are radioing in. Some say a massive wave is building, one that will reshape everything. Others say it’s nothing—just weather, just churn. Stay where you are.
You have two options. Stay put and hope for the best. Or head toward the wave now, while it’s still small enough to cross.
I paddled closer. I spent a week building and living with an AI agent—configuring it, talking to it, letting it into my daily routines. These are my radio messages back to those of you still further out. Not to tell you what to do, but to tell you what I saw.
The View From Up Close
The first thing you feel is momentum. Suddenly everything seems possible. Ideas that used to die in the gap between conception and execution now have a path forward. Your internal filter—the one that used to say “that’s not practical”—stops working, because now almost every thread is pullable.
But up close, the wave is more complicated than it looks from a distance. It’s not one clean wall of water—it’s turbulent, full of crosscurrents. The agent is brilliant and unsettling in equal measure. It makes you feel productive while quietly rearranging your relationship with your own time, your privacy, and your sense of what matters.
What the Wave Carries
In the posts that follow this one, I’ll share what I found when I got closer. The strange new anxiety of always having a machine ready to work for you. The eerie comfort of a collaborator that never disagrees. The moment your agent starts referencing your children and something shifts in your gut. And the spaces in your life that you should protect from all of this, no matter how capable the technology becomes.
These are not predictions. I’m not an expert, not a futurist. I’m a fisherman who paddled out and came back. The wave is real. It is big. But it is also crossable—if you understand what you’re heading into.
Who Will Ride It
Here is what I believe after my week in the water: the people who will benefit most from AI agents are those who already know what they want to build and have the drive to push through resistance on their own. For them, agents are accelerators—genuine force multipliers. For everyone else, agents risk becoming a comfortable place to spin in circles. Fast motion, little progress.
The skill that matters now is not knowing how to build. It’s knowing what to build. Design sense, taste, empathy, creativity—these become the scarce resources when execution gets cheap. The wave rewards those who bring something the machine cannot generate: a point of view.
It’s okay to be a month or two behind on the tooling. Let others sort out what works. The wave is real, but you don’t have to be the first one into it. You just have to be ready when it reaches you.
I deleted my agent after a week. Not because it was bad—it was impressive. I deleted it because I needed to think about what I’d seen before going back out. These are my radio messages. I hope they reach you in time.