--- title: "Echoes" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/31/echoes" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/31/echoes" issue: 31 section: "echoes" description: "Past infrastructure decisions echoing in today's production realities" authors: ["Rina Takahashi","Nora Kaplan"] published: 2026-06-01 updated: 2026-05-28 articles: 14 --- # TinyFish > CURRENT is a journal about AI agents in production, for the engineering and product leaders who have to make them work. Drawing on experience building enterprise web agents, it explains why the demo succeeded and the deployment didn't, and what that means for choosing vendors, briefing the board, and avoiding mistakes others have already made. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 31 — Echoes Past infrastructure decisions echoing in today's production realities ### The Identity Thread - [The Question That Keeps Getting Deferred]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-05-27 · Format: The Identity Thread Every identity mechanism on the web started with a person at a keyboard. When machines needed access, engineers didn't redesign the system. They removed the human from the flow and kept everything else. That worked for thirty years because each new caller was simpler and more predictable than the one before. Service accounts, cron jobs, scheduled API calls. The assumptions could stretch because nobody was stretching them very far. AI agents are the first caller that breaks the pattern. ### The Shadow Credentials - [Machines Have Been Borrowing Human Credentials for Three Decades. Agents Are Next in Line.]() — Published 2026-05-27 When software first needed to authenticate on enterprise networks in the 1990s, nobody designed a credential type for it. Engineers created a user account, removed the human, and moved on. No lifecycle tracking. No owner on record. No offboarding trigger when the project that spawned it quietly dissolved. ### The Credential Architect - [The Man Who Governed 300 Bots Watches AI Agents Arrive]() — Published 2026-05-27 *Enterprise identity governance was built for people. Directories, access reviews, joiner-mover-leaver workflows. Meanwhile, non-human identities quietly became the majority population. Service accounts, API keys, RPA bot credentials accumulated in the gaps between teams, ungoverned and often invisible. Now AI agents are arriving with the same credential needs and the same organizational blind spots.* ### Two Workarounds Agents Straddle - [The Exception That Became the Rule]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-05-27 · Format: Two Workarounds Agents Straddle OAuth was designed to separate identity from authorization. Who you are was one question; what you could do was another. The protocol would handle the second and leave the first alone. Then its edge-case provision — a grant type for when no human was present — absorbed the majority of traffic. The permission became the identity. The spec still reads as though someone is home. - [The Session That Assumed You Were There]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-05-27 · Format: Two Workarounds Agents Straddle In 1994, a Netscape engineer built cookies to remember your shopping cart and specifically rejected proposals to turn browsers into universal identity beacons. Thirty years later, the session token does exactly what he refused to build — it passes for proof of who you are. The browser's security model still assumes a human is making choices about where to go. That assumption is quietly breaking. ### Further Reading - **The Reasoning Behind Web Cookies** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 The inventor explains he built cookies for state, not identity. The web disagreed. - **OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 The lead author's resignation letter. A delegation protocol became an enterprise framework. Agents authenticate through the debris. - **The Non-Human Identity Crisis** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 Machine identities outnumber humans 144 to 1, still governed by frameworks that assume a person is typing. - **Secrets Are Leaking Everywhere, and Bots Are to Blame** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 Machine credentials accumulate like sediment. One in a thousand is over a decade old, unrotated. - **Google Just Fixed Session Cookie Theft. Here Is What It Still Cannot Stop.** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 Chrome bound sessions to hardware. Agents don't have hardware. The fix illuminates the gap it can't close. ### Past Articles - [The CAPTCHA Arms Race]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-05-21 · Format: Broken Assumptions CAPTCHAs were built on an assumption: that something fundamental separates human behavior from machine behavior, and a test can find it. Distorted text held for a while. Then image grids. Then behavioral scoring. Each generation drew a confident line between human and non-human, and each line eventually turned out to be a guess. The web keeps building gates on a boundary that won't stay put. - [Flaky Tests and the Prehistory of Agent Unreliability]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-05-21 · Format: Broken Assumptions Browser testing was built on an assumption: the script knows what it wants to do, and the chaos is in the world around it. Engineers spent a decade building coping infrastructure for that chaos — auto-waiting, stable locators, containerized environments. AI agents inherit the same non-determinism problem, but at a layer those tools were never designed to reach. The variability now lives inside the planning itself. - [The Same Gap, Three Times]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-05-21 · Format: The Recurring Bargain In the early 2000s, an engineer automating IBM mainframes built a small scripting language around a specific expectation: that the screens underneath his scripts would change, and his scripts would break. Fifty years later, the leading benchmark for AI browser agents uses frozen, self-hosted websites for the same reason. The automation got dramatically more sophisticated. What it keeps designing around is the same thing it was fifty years ago. - [RPA's Scar Tissue]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-05-13 · Format: Two Returns Between 2018 and 2023, the RPA industry cataloged its failures in painful detail: UI fragility, credential sprawl, ownership ambiguity, maintenance costs that dwarfed licensing. Agentic AI is now encountering every one of these failure modes as though for the first time. Gartner projects over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027, citing reasons that read like RPA post-mortems. The scar tissue is there. Nobody packed it for the trip. ## Other sections in Issue 31 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Vision]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()