Agents

It’s February 2026. Ember woke up to the gentle hum of the air conditioner outside her window. She had fallen asleep at her desk right after sending the team the remaining action items blocking tomorrow’s product launch.

Deciding to head straight to the office, she arrives and finds Liam, the engineering lead, reviewing the latest updates to the product. First cup of coffee brewed, she settles in next to him.

Her first sip is interrupted by a Slack message from Ruth. Ember lazily skims through Ruth’s message. Apparently, the team had done an outstanding job since last night.

She opens the project dashboard to find it bustling with updates. Every action item she had listed last night is either completed or awaiting the team’s review. Looks like seven pull requests across backend services were merged and deployed, with three more waiting for approval. Ember continues to approve two of them to get the landing page copy updated and notices they’re also running new ad copies and creatives. Six new suggestions have appeared on the board, ranging from minor bugs to strategic ideas to pursue. She sends out four of the email drafts that had popped into her inbox, leaving the rest for later.

“How’s the backend looking like? Are we getting ready?” she asks Liam.

“Meticulous,” he replies with a grin on his face, scrolling through the commits in the repositories. “The bugs from last night are gone, and the two features seamlessly integrated. It’s as if the entire team worked through the night.” The foundational work was done.

As the sun climbed higher, Ember strolled to the kitchen for another coffee. All the pieces were coming together. Tomorrow the world would see what they had built, and nothing would have felt more surreal than waking up to finding it nearly complete.

✴︎

The world seems to be converging on the definition of AI agents. I like to think about them as replacing traditional IF-ELSE statements in your code with large language model (LLM) calls. And by giving models capable of complex reasoning sufficient context, memory, tools – and letting them run in the background in an “ambient” way – we’re stepping into an exciting new era.

Who knows how our lives will change when artificial intelligence understands more about the world around us, thinks multiple steps ahead and takes action on our behalf, with our supervision.