Agents, a proxy to almost anything?

On 7 November I kept a quote from Sundar Pichai, from an interview on stage at Google I/O 2026. He thinks agents are going to be a fundamental part of how we work, and adds: “Once you get the taste […] there is no going back.”

The taste is the part I stopped on. I know that moment, and I’ve seen it happen to people around me. Before it, agents were something I had heard about. After it, I started to see where they could go.

When it clicked for me

On 28 October I handed my backlog to my personal knowledge base: more than a hundred Safari tabs, and the RSS feeds I had been collecting in NetNewsWire for years. The next day, the first batch went through. The tabs, a first handful of feeds and about sixty newsletters became sources the system can read, sort and come back to.

For a while I had been telling myself that the tools were probably ready for something like this. Seeing it work moved me from that guess to a plain fact. The main feeling was relief.

Since then, I’ve shown Claude Code to people around me. They were impressed, and for some of them something clicked: “so in my case, I could do that”. Well beyond code: their own work.

What clicks

What clicks, I think, is how much of what we interact with is surrounded by code. A desktop app, an email inbox, a bank account, a messaging app, a PDF, an image, the operating system itself: all of it, and all the data that lives inside, can be executed and manipulated by a machine.

So a powerful and well-harnessed agent can become the proxy to almost anything.

“Well-harnessed” is the condition. By that I mean an agent that comes with a powerful harness by default, working behind the scenes, so that the person using it gets a transparent and fluid experience. Claude Code is the one I use.

“Almost” is the word I can’t pin down. I can’t say where the proxy stops: every day the capabilities grow, and the line moves with them.

Four days

Someone close to me has days that mix writing, video editing, prospecting, client work and a knowledge base. I told her what Claude Code could do, and how I saw it adding to what she does. Then I set up a first system for her to take in hand.

• Day 0: intrigued, but perplexed.
• Day 1: overwhelmed. She felt she was losing control, the system asked her for extra work, and nothing came out of it straight away.
• Day 2: I told her to put off some of the tasks the system expected from her, and to focus on her priorities.
• Day 3: she started to feel its power, and to get better results than with the usual chat interfaces.
• Day 7: it had become part of her daily use.
• Day 15: she was giving it new tasks, beyond what she had first needed it for.

The difference, for her, was the harness: her knowledge, gathered in one place on her own machine, for the agent to work with.

Day 1 is part of the story as much as day 3. Before the click, there was a stretch where the tool cost her more than it gave.

The other side

I think this is transformative, the way the internet was. I know the comparison is everywhere, but I hold it. I was too young to live through that boom, and I would have loved to be 18 or 20 back then. This one I’m living, and building with.

My projection, from my own work and from what I see around me: some people will resist more than others, but the use will spread, until, I think, it becomes hard to keep producing without it. That may push people to accept AI so as not to fall behind, sometimes before they’ve had their own click. Those who resist aren’t wrong for it. They haven’t had their day 3 yet.

It also means learning to mitigate the risks, and to keep control of the system. What I do for now is isolate my working environments with AI as much as I can, and I try to review what comes out: not only its form, but above all its substance and function. For writing, I added a skill to my agent, so that every article starts with my own answers, before any draft. It keeps me out of the trap I described in the first article I published here: polished output looks finished, and it’s easy to take it for correct.

A starting point

I’ve always thought of myself as a maker: I like building things. With AI, I don’t want to be just a consumer. I want to build a system around all of it, and use it to my advantage.

Somewhere between what I had started building and what I had been reading, an idea took shape on its own. Pichai’s quote was the last push, and it came with a name: the agent as a “life” operating system.

Then I looked it up, and found that Daniel Miessler, and surely others, had got there a while ago, on both counts. He calls his system LifeOS, “The AI-Powered Life Operating System”, and describes it as a harness for doing anything in life and work with AI. In a post from December 2016, he already had the proxy, with what he called Digital Assistants, or DAs: “Humans interact with DAs, and DAs interact with the world.” The phrase itself is older than his project, from self-help and productivity tools; he’s where I met it in the sense of an agent.

That’s the direction I’m heading in. What I’ve built so far is only the starting point.

Where it should stop, I don’t know yet. I’ve taken a few precautions to start with, but privacy, security and the rest are still blurry to me, and hard to weigh.