Vision
Vision
When Agents Use the Doorway Built for Blind Users
When a developer forgets to give a button a name, a blind person using a screen reader hears only one word, "button," and nothing about what it does. Blind users have put up with this for years. Now AI agents reading the same page are left guessing too. That gives the companies paying for those agents a reason to finally fix the missing labels, helping blind users along the way. Or those companies could build their agents a way around the problem and leave the buttons unnamed.
When Agents Use the Doorway Built for Blind Users
When a developer forgets to give a button a name, a blind person using a screen reader hears only one word, "button," and nothing about what it does. Blind users have put up with this for years. Now AI agents reading the same page are left guessing too. That gives the companies paying for those agents a reason to finally fix the missing labels, helping blind users along the way. Or those companies could build their agents a way around the problem and leave the buttons unnamed.
Paired Features
The Agent Your Agent Hired
Letting an AI agent act for you repeats an old arrangement: someone doing a job in your name. Now agents are starting to pass your tasks to other agents you never picked, and centuries of law on acting for someone else ask who is really deciding. Even taking your permission back may not settle it. Starting November 24, Wells Fargo will ask customers who cancel an agent's access to their accounts to take steps to stop it, and to keep proof they did.
Selling to a Shopper That Reasons
Shopping has changed who does the choosing before. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly in Memphis let shoppers take goods off the shelf themselves instead of handing a list to a clerk, so the box had to do the clerk's selling. Now shoppers are handing the list back, this time to an AI agent that chooses for them, and sellers are already rewriting their product information for it. The open question is whether a smarter agent resists that pitch.
Do Not Trust the Green Checkmark. A Conversation With the Last Fluent Speaker of a Terrible Portal
CONTINUE READINGQuick Take
About a third of organizations told McKinsey this year that they skipped buying at least one piece of software because AI coding agents could build it instead. That's self-reported, and "at least one" could mean a single internal dashboard. The follow-up nobody asked is the one I care about: how many of those tools are still running, and who gets woken up at 3 AM when the damn thing falls over?
Writing the code was always the cheap part. The expensive part is the years after: security patches, upgrades, outages. One large GitHub study found that autonomous agents raised code changes about 240%, while finished releases rose only 30%. Agents sped up writing far more than shipping.
So maybe the build-versus-buy line moves. Owning code gets nearly free. What you'd still pay a vendor for is someone else carrying the pager, the alert that drags a human out of bed.
Further Reading
