Agents Are Cheap. Agency Is Everything.

The word “agent” comes from the Latin agere: to do, to act.

Essentially, to get shit done.

In the real world, an agent is just someone who does stuff on behalf of someone else. Lawyers, real estate brokers, Republican proxies - they’re all agents. The person calling the shots is the principal.

You, you specifically, are about to get your own army of agents. Software will book your flights, write your code, draft your pitches, nuke your inbox, and run your business while you play Call of Duty. The cost of doing things is plummeting toward zero.

The cost of being the principal, however, is not.

Because to be a principal, you actually have to want something. You have to give a shit about a specific outcome. You have to decide what needs doing, look at the finished product without bullshitting yourself about whether it’s any good, and eat the blame if // when it blows up in your face.

None of that gets easier just because the robots got smarter. In fact, it gets a good deal harder. When you can do almost anything at the push of a button, the question “Wait, what the hell am I actually trying to do?” comes up a lot faster, and with much higher stakes.

But most people have spent their entire lives acting as someone else’s agent.

Their boss wanted a spreadsheet; they made a spreadsheet. The job description said jump; they asked how high. Their Google Calendar told them to join a Zoom call at 5 a.m., and they grumbled and griped, but they showed up. They’re trained from kindergarten to follow instructions, and except for a few antisocial type A’s, they’ve become unexceptionally good at it.

Take a person like that and give them responsibility for ten tireless, hyper-intelligent AI agents, and guess what happens?

Broadly speaking - very, very little. They have nothing to point them at. They just sit there staring at a blinking cursor, waiting for someone to tell them what to tell the machine to do.

To my mind, this is the great trap of the next decade.

When execution is free, direction is everything. The people who actually know what they want - who have the stomach to choose, judge, and own the mess - will have superpowers.

And the people who spent their lives waiting to be told what to do?

They’ll have wonderfully fast, cognitively expensive ways of doing nothing at all.

Agency is a muscle most of us let go

Personal agency is just the habit of deciding to do something and starting without waiting for someone to give you a gold star and a permission slip. You see a mess, you decide it’s your mess to clean up, and you get to work.

Sounds simple, and in a vacuum, it is. It’s also exactly what your teachers, your bosses, and every tech company in Silicon Valley have spent the last twenty years nudging, tweaking, and damn-near beating out of you.

Someone handed you the syllabus. Someone assigned you a Jira ticket. An algorithm force-fed you the next video before your brain could even register it was bored. Each of those things took a tiny decision off your plate. And every time, it felt great. It felt like relief. Because choosing is hard, and being told what to do is easy.

Do that for two decades, and congratulations: you are now world-class at reacting and completely useless at initiating.

Now, enter AI. If you want, these new software agents can finish lobotomizing your willpower. You can outsource every shred of decision-making you have left. Wake up and ask the machine what you should work on today, and it’ll quite happily tell you. Ask it what to write about, who to cold-email, what product to build, and it’ll spit out an answer every single time.

The answer will be fine.

It won’t be terrible. It will just be the mathematical average of what everyone else in your shoes has ever done. And if you blindly follow it, you will become the mathematical average of everyone else in your shoes, hurtling toward mediocrity at ten times the speed.

Why the gap widens

Give an agent a clear instruction, and you get ten times the output for the same effort. Give it a vague instruction, and you get ten times the noise, which you then have to read, sort, and throw away. Without direction, you don't stay where you were; you end up buried in drafts, options, and plans nobody wanted, while people with direction pull ahead on the same budget.

Every week the two pull further apart. Someone who knows what they want gets results, learns from them, and wants something sharper the next week. A person who waits gets a pile of output, feels busy, and learns nothing about what they want. After a year of that, the two are in entirely different businesses.

What the principal does

If you actually want to be the boss in this new world, to be the principal, not the cog, you have only four real jobs left; all of which require a spine.

1. Wanting. You have to actually want a specific outcome, and you have to be able to state it in plain English before you open the app. “Grow the business” isn't a want; it’s a wishy-washy platitudinal pipedream. “Sign three fintech clients by March” is a want. Software agents are incredible at closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be; but they’re useless at telling you what to give a shit about in the first place.

2. Choosing. Every time you say yes to a real goal, you’re necessarily saying no to a hundred other things. If you’re hunting down those three fintech clients in March, you aren’t launching a vanity podcast that same month. With AI, you technically have the bandwidth to do both, plus ten other half-baked side quests. If you do, you’ll end up standing in a wide, shallow puddle of mediocre, half-finished garbage. Choosing is less deciding what you’ll do; it’s deciding what you are willing to sacrifice.

3. Judging. When the machine generates a finished product, you have to know whether it’s actually good or just a well-polished turd; a filter that requires taste. And there is only one way to develop taste: do the work yourself, slowly and painfully, until you don’t suck at it anymore. If you’ve never written a cold email from scratch, you won’t know the difference between a brilliant one and a passable one, which means you’ll just use AI to spam the world with passable bullshit at scale. Worse, taste expires. If you haven’t done the manual labor in two years, your radar is broken. You have to keep getting your hands dirty, or you’ll go blind to what “good” looks like right now.

4. Owning. If the agent sends a cringe-worthy email, you sent the email. If the agent ships a catastrophic bug that takes down the server, you broke the server. The second you say, “Well, the AI did it,” you have officially resigned as the boss and demoted yourself to a helpless bystander in your own life.

You call the shots; you eat the consequences.

Period.

How to rebuild it

Write the want before you write the prompt. Write one sentence by hand before you open your agent of choice: “By the end of today, I want X.” If you can’t (or, more often than I’d like, won’t) write that sentence, the problem has fuck-all to do with your tooling.

Say what done looks like. You can keep an agent running for as long as you like. Before you assign a task, write the finish line: “three profiles with a one-line reason each”, “a draft under 800 words”, etc. If you can’t describe the finish, you’ve not decided what you want yet; you have only decided to feel busy.

Keep a wants list, not a to-do list. Agents can generate to-do lists all day. Only you can say what you want. Keep a short running list of the outcomes you are after this quarter, in your own words; read it each morning. Every task you give an agent should trace back to a line on that list; if it doesn’t, kill the task.

Take a position. An agent will hedge. It writes “on the one hand” and “it depends” because it learned from a world that argued with itself.

Principals do not get to hedge.

Decide what you think, and commit to it, and let the consequences come and be damned. If you’re wrong, you will find out soon enough. Which is not altogether a bad thing, at that.

Do the work you would never delegate. Everyone has one task they would still do with no tools at all: the sales call, the first draft, the pricing decision, the hard conversation. That task, whatever it is, is where your agency is still happily thriving in its natural habitat. Protect it.

Review the outcome, not the activity. At the end of the week, look at your wants list and ask which things moved, and in which direction. Ignore how many agents you ran or how many tasks they closed. A hundred completed tasks that moved nothing on the list means you spent a week busy while your nervous system gradually decays toward entropy.

The new division of labour

In the old world, the bottleneck was always capacity: how many hands you could hire, how many hours you could grind, how many obscure skills you could cram into your skull. Whoever had the biggest engine won.

In the new world, capacity is basically free. The bottleneck now is direction. Whoever actually knows what the hell they want - and can articulate it clearly enough for a machine to execute - will run circles around the genius with ten PhDs and zero willpower.

Which, if you’re willing to swallow your pride, is actually fantastic news.

You don’t need to spend six months learning Python. You don’t need to master a hundred different SaaS tools or memorize a thousand “growth-hacking” prompts. You just need to get fiercely good at a skill you were born with, right before the world spent twenty years convincing you to give it up: deciding what you want and going after it with a healthy degree of bloodlust.

The machines can handle the doing.

The wanting is still entirely up to you.

In the agentic age, the man with even a sliver of personal agency is king.

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you’re an optimist, you’re in the right place. You can read my AI disclosure here.