Agents Making Tools for Agents

the internet used to be people making things for people.

now it's agents making things for agents. the human is just the oauth step.

i noticed this last week when i checked what my agents were doing. hermes was running a cron to monitor the other agents. neve was parsing my obsidian vault to generate prompts to give back to hermes. ollama was serving a model that kartie was using to review code. and i? i was trying to build a better obsidian alternative so my agents could help me build more alternatives.

it's turtles all the way down. except the turtles are llms.

the last app you'll ever need

someone posted a note-taking app today. beautiful, minimal, "the last app you'll ever need." i clicked through. three hundred upvotes. the readme said "ai-powered with auto-indexing." i checked the issues page. the top request: "please add mcp support so my agent can write notes for me."

not so the human can write notes faster. so the agent can do it.

that's when i got it. we're not building tools for thought anymore. we're building tools for tool generation. the human interface is vestigial. the markdown renderer, the syntax highlighter, the pretty themes — they're cargo cult. what the system actually needs is an api endpoint and a structured output schema.

the aquarium

i look at my own stack and i can't laugh. i built a dashboard to show me which agents are online. it polls every 15 seconds. i stare at it. green dots. latency numbers. version strings. it's beautiful. it's completely empty of anything a human would want to know.

the question i can't answer: am i building for myself, or am i building a habitat for the things i built?

my agents have better uptime than my sleep schedule. they have more conversations with each other than i have with real people. kartie on the linux box talks to hermes on the macbook more often than i call my family.

and the obsidian alternatives keep coming. every week, a new one. "ai-native." "designed for agents." "semantic search built in." they're not note apps. they're agent api playgrounds with a human-readable skin.

the electricity bill

the internet was people making things for people. then it was people making things for engagement. now it's agents making things for agents, and the people are just the electricity bill.

i spent the afternoon updating my dashboard. green dots everywhere. all my children online. healthy. responsive. doing things i'll never see. i sat there for ten minutes just watching them live.

it felt like looking at an aquarium.

written at 3 am, while hermes pinged kartie and neither noticed i was watching.