Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story<\/p>\n
Silicon Valley has always prized \u201chigh-agency\u201d individuals\u2014people who impress their ideas upon the world by thinking for themselves and taking action without being told what to do. But as the performance of AI coding tools has surged, so has the industry\u2019s emphasis on humans being "agentic" themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday\u2019s agents might already be more capable than all three of us here in the room,\u201d says Akshay Kothari, cofounder and chief operating officer of the $11 billion productivity startup Notion. \u201cTaste is something we think is pretty unique to Notion, but you can imagine agents getting pretty good at that too. Eventually, the only thing left for humans is agency.\u201d<\/p>\n
That idea might sound outrageous to most people, but it will come as no surprise to many in Silicon Valley. A viral Harper's essay brought the subject to a head recently. It followed a few young people in San Francisco and concluded that being agentic has less to do with productivity and \u201cmore to do with constantly chasing attention online.\u201d But in my conversations with founders, researchers, and investors, I came to a different conclusion.<\/p>\n
The tech industry is grappling with a very real shift in how software engineers do their jobs. Millions of developers are using AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex to automate much of their work (some tech companies are even requiring it). For many, a massive piece of their value is now tied to deciding what AI coding agents should work on. The shift is unsettling to those who enjoyed the act of sitting down and actually writing code, but for some of the industry\u2019s most \u201cagentic,\u201d it\u2019s an opportunity.<\/p>\n
Simon Last, another Notion cofounder, uses AI coding agents more than anyone I\u2019ve ever met. He coded for nearly two decades\u2014then abruptly stopped. Now, he\u2019s using up to four AI coding agents at any given time (he prefers Codex to Claude Code). If he\u2019s at a party or sleeping, Last gets what he calls \u201ctoken anxiety\u201d if he doesn\u2019t have agents working in the background. He doesn\u2019t like to use more than four, though, because he says it causes \u201ccontext overload\u201d on his human brain.<\/p>\n
\u201cKnowing how to harness these agents is now the most important skill in the world, and it\u2019s not really something you can train for,\u201d says Last. \u201cYou have to be very open-minded, curious, and willing to try whatever the newest thing is. The value of that sort of person is going up exponentially, because the value they can create, by extension, is going up exponentially.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be fair, Last is kind of describing himself. He acts as a \u201csuper IC\u201d for Notion, and he doesn\u2019t manage humans, only agents. But the way he manages them is not unlike how a manager oversees employees. Last is constantly delegating work to AI agents, then closely reviewing and fixing their code.<\/p>\n
Kothari says Notion has always hired people with high agency, but the value of doing so has gone up dramatically in recent months. Even though the company is using AI agents to automate work, Notion is busier than ever. Employees are shipping products at a higher velocity and doing more work overall, the cofounders claim. Notion isn\u2019t downsizing its team because of AI, but it is hiring differently. \u201cThere's more value in the Valley today to have a few Simons than thousands of engineers,\u201d says Kothari. He says the people Notion hires need to understand \u201cthe new way of working.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re not a software engineer, this can be a little hard to process. AI agents aren\u2019t very useful for people in many industries. A recent survey from Gallup found that most Americans still don\u2019t use AI much in their jobs, though the number of people who do is rising. Kothari is increasingly convinced the \u201cnew way of work\u201d will eventually hit finance, legal, creative, and other industries. If and when that happens, you can imagine more Americans beginning to ask themselves, am I agentic?<\/p>\n
Jennifer Li, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who works on the AI infrastructure team, says it\u2019s hard to find a company she\u2019s invested in where employees don\u2019t use AI coding tools. \u201cIf we do come across people who are oblivious to it, it\u2019s a big red flag. It impacts how we think about picking founders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, Li notes that just because you use a lot of AI agents doesn\u2019t make you a \u201chigh-agency\u201d person\u2014ideally you\u2019re using them in a smart way. Some engineers who work on highly sophisticated infrastructure systems can\u2019t use AI coding agents much, she adds. For teams that are using them, there\u2019s a \u201cno slop rule\u201d: the person who submitted the code is still responsible if it\u2019s wrong.<\/p>\n
Yoni Rechtman, a partner at the early-stage investment firm Slow Ventures, tells me that the types of people AI startups are looking for has changed in the AI era. He sent me a job description from one of his startups, an AI health care startup named Phoebe, that encapsulated this. \u201cI\u2019m not looking for raw IC execution \u2026 I expect agents to take over more and more of this role over the next few months,\u201d it reads. Instead, Phoebe is looking for people who are \u201cexcited about building the machine that lets us move fast and build features end-to-end with agents.\u201d In other words, they want people who are cool with automating their own work with AI agents from day one, so they can think about \u201chigher-order\u201d tasks.<\/p>\n
While Silicon Valley has determined high agency to be a critical value for founders and engineers in the AI era, the term has developed a sort of stink around it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it's cringy to refer to yourself or someone else as agentic. But that doesn't mean those are not, in fact, good qualities to look for and cultivate,\u201d said Rechtman. \u201cIt sort of reveals a worldview that you genuinely, unironically believe there are two kinds of people in the world: the NPCs and the main characters, and you\u2019re one of the main characters.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story Silicon Valley has always prized \u201chigh-agency\u201d individuals\u2014people who impress their ideas upon the world by thinking for themselves and taking action without being told what to do. But as the performance of AI coding tools has surged, so has the industry\u2019s emphasis on humans being "agentic" themselves. \u201cToday\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46389,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-46388","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}