Agents are just good defaults

An agent is a loop with good defaults. That is the whole trick. The models got good enough that a well-scoped loop with sensible fallbacks now outperforms a human glued to a dashboard.

Where do agents earn their keep today? Narrow, high-volume, reversible decisions: triaging tickets, reconciling data, drafting first passes. The moment a decision is irreversible, a human belongs in the loop.

The mistake is reaching for autonomy when you need reliability. Start with the boring workflow, automate the default path, and let the edge cases surface on their own.

In five years we will not call them agents. We will call them software. The teams building them now are simply early.