The AI Agent Economy Is Here

**Gary** (0:00)
Welcome to another episode of The Lightcone. Things are a bit different around here. For one thing, Claude Code has totally taken over my life. And if Jared has any indication, I think OpenClaw maybe has taken over his.

**Jared** (0:15)
I've been really addicted to this new site called MoltBook, where people have unleashed their AIs to interact in the first ever AI agent only online community. I'm here impersonating my personal OpenClaw instance right here.

**Gary** (0:29)
Okay, I can't do this, guys. We gotta take this off.
Okay, we've gotten that out of the way. I mean, some crazy stuff is happening right now. I have non-technical CEO friends who are going all in on OpenClaw. They're automating entire parts of their businesses, entirely using OpenClaw right now, which is totally insane. Simultaneous to that, you have product and former engineering CEOs, kind of like myself. I hadn't written code in 10 years. And then now I'm up till 2, 3 a.m. every single night, running four conductor simultaneous workers with Cloud Code. So there's sort of this explosion in model capability. We've been talking about this for several years, but then it feels like it's here. Like AGI is literally actually here. And we're sort of at the thin edge of the wedge. Like everyone now kind of knows like one or two people who have gone full cyber psychosis and I'm one of those people now. What's happening, guys? Like, I mean, you're saying you're all in on MoltBook. What's going on?

**Jared** (1:42)
Yeah. I feel like your real feel the AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Cloud Code to build basically an entire startup for you, like replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane. And I had a similar feel the AGI moment, just reading MoltBook, just reading the AI talking to each other and interacting like in their own world with no or minimal human involvement. It just really opened my eyes to what the next few years could look like when the agents are unleashed and go on about their lives without us.

**Harjit** (2:12)
Yeah, I think the no human involvement is the big piece. Like if you think back a year ago, we were talking about Cursor versus Windsurf, and like that product experience was essentially like advanced, auto-complete arguably. And now clearly what's going on with Cloud Code is like that people just trust the agents to make decisions for them. It's like the experience is like, and like you're talking about, it's like four or five different agents going at the same time and you're switching between them, but you're not actually micromanaging them anymore, which means the agents are going out there like choosing things, which sort of an interesting, unexpected application of that is like they can go out and choose to post their own content on a site like MoltBook. But then an interesting thing for builders is the agents are going to go out and choose tools to use to build things, which is going to essentially creates whole economy of agents, like picking and choosing dev tools or maybe other like products and goods and services, who knows? But it will essentially have this whole agent economy going on in parallel to the human economy.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:09)
I think back in the days, old days before all of this, dev tools were chosen more from developers talking to each other or-

**Gary** (3:20)
Stack overflow.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:21)
Stack overflow.

**Gary** (3:22)
So unbelievable, right?

**SPEAKER_4** (3:23)
Or GitHub repos that would trend, that were done by a human. But the go-to market for dev tools, I think is dramatically shifting. I think for a couple of things. One, as you noted with the cyber psychosis, suddenly the market of developers has increased from just 20 million or so developers that are trained in computer science to now anyone in the world could be one.

**Gary** (3:46)
It could be hundreds of millions of people now.

**Jared** (3:48)
Plus all of their agents who are all acting like semi-independently, like Harjit is saying.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:52)
And then compounded with the agents who then are sort of the oracle telling you what the best tool is. And we are actually seeing some of those trends with the growth of YC companies, DevTool companies that are doing really well because of all these trends. Maybe we should talk about those and why is that?

**Harjit** (4:11)
The one that springs to mind, it's like a stash here, a friend of ours, Yuri Sagalov had mentioned to me a while ago, which is like, then if you look at like the number of databases being created over, like simple database, postgres databases over like the last 12 months, and the number has just exploded. And that's because it's all people vibe coding and building apps and the agents going out choosing like a database tool. And like a knock on effect for that for YC company is Superbase. It's just seen like an explosion at the demand for databases, right? And the age was interesting is the agents are choosing Superbase as a default tool to like set up and host their postgres database. Like because if you like go out and read the documentation online, like Superbase has the best documentation is reasonable for the agents to assume that that's like the best tool to use.