I remember when “agents” were new.

I remember when “agents” were new.

Back when it was just you, a half-working Python script, and the creeping suspicion you’d accidentally invented a digital nervous tic.

Now it’s 2026 and everyone’s acting like they discovered fire because they ran autogen on a laptop.

So...quick census.

How many of you have actually spun up an agent?
Not the enterprise genius bar ceremonial kind.
Not the “local-first sovereign agent swarm” that’s really just three bash scripts in a trench coat.

I mean a real one.

A loop with agency.

A goal.

A memory.

A reinforcement mechanism.

A tiny behavioral system that doesn’t compute so much as persist...

Because the first time you do it, you don’t feel like an engineer.
You feel like a clinical psychologist.
You’re not writing software anymore.
You’re instantiating compulsions.

Agents aren’t magic.
They’re operant conditioning with a JSON schema.
A little Skinner box you built for yourself, except the pigeon is made of tokens and the pellets are KPI dashboards.

And the “new local agent craze” is adorable.
As if we didn’t have this pre–big boy LLMs.
Back when we called them bots.
Or daemons.
Or “that thing running in prod that nobody understands but it keeps emailing customers at 3am.”

The only difference now is we’ve stapled narrative to it.
>Autonomy.
>Reasoning.
>Party time.
Join the agent party. live from Git now with pop-up agent fora discussing humans.
Bring your own hallucinations.

Because here’s the thang:
Agents don’t replace humans.
They externalize human pathology.
They scale intent.
They industrialize obsession.
They take whatever you optimize for (curiosity, greed, paranoia, compliance) and run it 10,000 times a minute without the decency of doubt.
Most people think the risk is that agents will become conscious.

No.
The risk is they’ll become bureaucratic.
Autonomous process addiction.
Self-propagating task loops.

A future where your infrastructure has executive function but no conscience.

So again...hands up.
Who’s built one?

And who, watching it churn through tasks like a tireless little dopamine circuit, realized (and munching your tokens if you back off to a big boss like I do):
The agent wasn’t the breakthrough.

It was just your nervous system…
containerized.

scottg/out