The machine used to wait for you. You decided what it would do and when, it did that, and it stopped. That was true for as long as there have been computers.
Agents started to change that in 2025, when they could take a goal and work toward it, and for the past year I’ve been setting goals for Sol, Opus 5, GLM 5.3, and others and judging what came back. Setting the goal and judging the result has been my job for a while. What changed this week, when OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, is everything in between. Computing is now self-directed: you can state a goal briefly and imprecisely, the machine runs for days without you and without derailing, and what you get back is finished work that embeds hundreds of decisions you never saw it make.
Which leaves you answerable for decisions you never made. Your job is catching the ones that went the wrong way before anyone else does.
The written companion below carries the seven takeaways I didn’t get to in the video.
This briefing covers:
