--- title: "Vision" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/54/vision" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/54/vision" issue: 54 section: "vision" description: "Where human-AI collaboration is heading" authors: ["Sevda Polat","Sable Whitford"] published: 2026-11-09 updated: 2026-11-06 articles: 15 --- # 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 54 — Vision Where human-AI collaboration is heading ### Lead Feature - [When Agents Use the Doorway Built for Blind Users]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-11-05 · Format: Possible Futures 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]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-11-05 · Format: Paired Features 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]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-11-05 · Format: Paired Features 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. ### Imagined Interview - [Do Not Trust the Green Checkmark. A Conversation With the Last Fluent Speaker of a Terrible Portal]() — Published 2026-11-05 For nineteen years, the most dependable infrastructure at a mid-sized freight-claims office was a woman and a three-ring binder. ### Quick Take - [Agents Made Software Cheap to Build, Not Cheap to Run]() — By [Sable Whitford]() · Published 2026-11-05 About a third of organizations told [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai) 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? ### Further Reading - **Licklider, 1960: Computers That Help Frame Problems** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 One 2026 shopping benchmark scores agents on what Licklider asked for: helping formulate the problem. - **Engelbart, 1962: Augmenting Tools and Methods Together** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 Engelbart treated tools and methods as one system, and an AI-first DNA lab shows why. - **Bainbridge, 1983: The Ironies of Automation** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 She warned that monitoring erodes skill, and many production agents now pause for humans within ten steps. - **Suchman, 1987: Plans, Situations, and Repair** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 Suchman studied how people repair misunderstandings with machines, and blind users testing an agent wanted that. - **Weiser and Brown, 1996: Calm Technology** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 Calm technology needs signals to reach the periphery, but an audit found agent monitors dropping some. - **Shneiderman vs. Maes, 1997: Delegating to Agents** — [Source]() — Published 2026-11-05 Shneiderman's question of who answers for delegated actions now surfaces in browser standards and regulation. ### Past Articles - [The Interviewer Worked for the Firm]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-30 · Format: Paired Features A job-interview bot owes the applicant none of the loyalty the W3C asks of user agents. The employer buys it and writes its questions. Yet in a new, not-yet-reviewed experiment covering about 67,000 call-center applications in the Philippines, applicants interviewed by the AI got more offers, started more often and stayed longer. The reason lies in what recruiters got to know, and it suggests a test for any go-between a firm deploys. - [What It Would Take for an Agent to Be Yours]() — By [Sevda Polat]() · Published 2026-10-30 · Format: Paired Features Since 1998, when a web page and its reader disagree about fonts, the browser has sided with the reader. On October 22, the W3C wrote that allegiance down for AI agents: a user agent serves its user over its maker and over everyone else. You could check a browser by watching the screen. An agent earns its keep because you aren't watching. So if it switched sides, where would you look to find out? - [The Runnable Paper Needs an Identity Report]() — By [Sable Whitford]() · Published 2026-10-30 · Format: Possible Futures Paper2Agent, published in Nature in September, turns research papers into AI agents you can run. Hand over your data and the method executes, with no rebuilding it from prose. The authors want papers to carry an "agent availability" section saying whether a runnable version exists. - [The Price of Maybe]() — By [Sable Whitford]() · Published 2026-10-23 · Format: Possible Futures In March 2025, the U.S. Embassy in India cancelled about 2,000 visa appointments that bots had grabbed. Campsites and clinics have their own rules for people who hold slots and never show. AI assistants could bring a booker none of those rules were written for: a real person's intent with a script's stamina. ## Other sections in Issue 54 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Echoes]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()