Transcription
I really don't know how to sugarcoat this, so I'll say it up front. AI agents are a scam.
Personally, I think if you're looking for agents to eliminate tasks and reduce headcount, you're heading in the wrong direction. That's because agents are the least reliable, most expensive, and amateurish way to run a production workload that's ever been invented. The AI industry is selling them to you anyway because every agent burns tokens, and tokens is how they get paid.
So, in this video, I'm going to go back to software first principles and explain how serious software actually runs. I mentioned this in the previous thought experiment video about eliminating windows. That's because the gold standard for software distribution is the compiled binary. In simple terms, that's that means that software that's been translated directly into the machine instructions for a specific chip. It's designed to run on that chip and that chip only. That means the processor runs exactly what's written, and there's no interpreter sitting in the middle. There's no runtime guessing what you meant, and the same input produces the same output every time on every machine with the same architecture.
That means I can write code here on my MacBook Pro and know that everybody with exactly the same computer, it will run exactly the same way. That's how your operating system runs. That's how your database runs. That's how the firmware in your car runs because when the stakes are real, we ship binaries. A binary is fast because it's native. It's reliable because it's deterministic, and it's cheap because it does the work and gets out of the way. So, if you want a workload at scale, you need to build as close to the binary as you possibly can.