This is the AWS moment for agents.
OpenAI just shipped the Agents API, and everything that made agents hard to build is now something you rent instead of build. Keeping one running for days, remembering what it's doing, using tools, recovering when a step fails. Now it's an API call.
Before AWS, you had to buy and run your own servers, so only well funded teams could build real/scalable products.
AWS made the hard part rentable, and all the value moved up to whoever had the best idea for what to build on top. Same thing is happening here.
I'll be honest, my first reaction was that this is bad news for a lot of people I know. If your whole company is an agent platform, the thing you spent the last year building is now included for the price of tokens.
But the more I sat with it, the more I think it's really good news if you're building for one specific industry. Basically, vertical software type stuff.
If the hardest engineering just became a line item, then the only thing left that's actually hard is knowing the job. Like what counts as a done claim, what makes a filing get rejected, where the money leaks.
So the wedge now is owning one painful workflow with your own tools, data, approvals, and a clear ROI. Freight exceptions, insurance reviews, security triage, revenue leakage, healthcare admin, compliance ops.
I see a lot of doomers on X saying software is over (and sometimes I feel the same way), you'll just use Claude or ChatGPT for everything.
BUT, if that were true, OpenAI wouldn't be shipping infrastructure for other people to build agents on.
They're telling you exactly what they think: the general model is theirs, the 10,000+ specific jobs it needs to be pointed at are yours.
I think software is just evolving.
It's becoming an agent internet, and every layer of it, the tools, the workflows, the boring jobs, gets rebuilt for a user that doesn't have eyes or hands.
That's a lot of companies waiting to be built.
@gregisenberg