Jul 2026·essayThe agent economy runs on permission slipsCross River and Stripe mint a single-use card for every agent purchase. The autonomous agent economy is really delegation under bank supervision.
Jul 2026·essayCloning ClaudeAlibaba ran 28.8 million queries through Claude to distill it. The API that monetizes a frontier model is also the vector that copies it.
Jun 2026·essayCUDA is the x86 of AIEvery open-weight AI model runs on CUDA. NVIDIA owns the platform and the chip beneath it, so the substrate captures the economics the model gives away.
Jun 2026·essayYou can't print this one on a t-shirtAdam Back's RSA t-shirt was classified as a munition in the 1990s. The US just did the same to Anthropic's Fable 5—for refusing the Pentagon.
Jun 2026·essayWho decides which agents get to transact?Mastercard and Visa announced agent credentialing systems on the same day. The claim underneath: the right to decide which AI agents can act in commerce.
Jun 2026·essayApple rented the brainApple just handed Google the intelligence layer of 2.2 billion devices, and the contract clause protecting users costs Google almost nothing.
Jun 2026·essayInference got 430× cheaper. Your agent didn't.Inference got 430x cheaper per token, but agents burn 100x more of them. Real savings on agentic workloads is 4.3x, not 430x. Why the curves diverge.
Jun 2026·essayCompute is an energy business. Bitcoin miners knew first.The binding constraint on AI isn't chips—it's power. The Bitcoin miners who survived the 2024 halving already own the grid-connected megawatts.
May 2026·essayThe cost of intelligence just hit zeroAI inference prices fell 1000x in three years. Open-weight models like DeepSeek and Kimi mean the floor stays low permanently.
Apr 2026·essayEvery agent in production is a strangerThe internet's trust mechanisms all trace back to a human who can be held responsible. Agents remove the human. The infrastructure was not designed for that.
Apr 2026·essayThe catalog isn't the marketRegistries indexed 100,000+ agents. Developers still use Google to find MCP servers. The catalog problem got solved. The discovery problem didn't.
Apr 2026·essayThe limit isn't reasoning. It's reach.Agent connections are still hand-built. The pieces to fix that exist—but nobody's assembled them yet.
Mar 2026·essayThe CLI is the new APISaaS companies are shipping CLIs built for agents, not developers. The CLI is the new line between connected and irrelevant.
Mar 2026·essayThe real tokenomicsThe seat was both the pricing unit and the moat. When agents do the work, both collapse. Companies that haven't moved are watching their multiples compress.
Mar 2026·essayToo big to fail, againAI concentration risk mirrors too big to fail banking. When OpenAI or Anthropic go down, companies that replaced staff with AI pipelines lose all capacity.
Mar 2026·essayAgents need computers, not computeAI agents need persistent environments, not ephemeral compute. The cloud abstracted away the machine—agents are buying it back.
Mar 2026·essayAgent-era infrastructureEvery layer of internet infrastructure assumed a human user. Agents break that assumption across compute, discovery, identity, and payments.
Mar 2026·essayAgent payments have a three-body problemVisa, Mastercard, and PayPal shipped agent payment products. Read the fine print and it's the same system with an agent-shaped UI. The real battle is political.
Feb 2026·noteNothing enforces your agent's rulesAgent skills carry rules with no enforcement underneath. The skill layer is a trust layer—you write the instructions, the model reads them, and you hope.
Feb 2026·noteI know Kung FuA SKILL.md file turns an agent into a specialist instantly—no training run, no fine-tuning. Skills are distribution channels, and the authors are the new buyers.