Six Things That Changed About Software When Agents Arrived
Agents have changed software as we know it. Here is something that was never true before: two users can send the identical message to the same product and get different work done, at different cost, over different durations, with different results. This is not a bug. It is the new contract between the user and the product.
I build with agents every day, and increasingly through them. What I keep noticing is that this isn't one change, it's six separate ones, and most teams still treat them as one thing ("we added AI"). Taken apart:
1. The request–response cycle has entirely changed
A request used to be a straight line. The user clicks, the server computes, the response renders. Every step was designed ahead of time by an engineer who knew exactly what would happen.
