There's a warm, cozy, lovely feeling to walking into a room full of people who care about the same weird things you do. The low murmur of conversation, cheap pizza that's been sitting too long, the look in someone's eyes lighting up when you mention a problem they've been wrestling with for months, the spilt soda water that narrowly missed your laptop (phew! Maybe could’ve done without that one).
Earlier this month, I was in Salt Lake City at a developer meetup, talking about what it means to design for agents, these new-fangled users who don't always watch much video but devour their primitives. Things like transcripts and thumbnails and analytics and metadata are made to help humans experience the video; likewise, the agents feast upon the same output like leftover meetup pizza.
As my eyes meandered that room, I kept thinking about how every person there had chosen to leave their house on a cold February evening. They could have watched a recording or asked an AI to summarize the key points in bullet form. Instead they showed up, asked questions, and introduced themselves to strangers who might become collaborators or friends. That's the part no agent can replicate.
We're living through a shift that's hard to fully comprehend while it's happening. The tools are changing faster than anyone can document, and somewhere in the middle of all this automation, gathering around a table with other humans has never felt more essential.
Here’s where we’ll be (in human form) in the upcoming months.
