Agents Are Products
An agent that does a thing on its own is a product — that's the whole word. The model inside it is a commodity you swap; the part you can't commoditize is the person deciding what it should do.
An agent does a thing. That’s the whole word — it acts. A thing that acts on its own and gets a job done more cheaply than a person doing it by hand is a product. So agents are products. I’d go further: the agent is the product, and most of the stack underneath it is commodity.
That’s worth saying plainly, because a lot of what’s been sold as “AI” is the opposite — something people pay for that doesn’t actually do anything. A chat box wired to a model is not an agent and not a product; it’s a demo with a price tag. The bar for an agent to be a product is low and specific: it has to do the thing.
The confusion is about where the value sits. The model is not the product. Models are commodities — there are many of them, they leapfrog each other constantly, and the one you build on today is not the one you’ll run next year. If your product is “we use this model,” you don’t have a product, you have a dependency. The tool set is closer to the product, because it’s the part that’s actually yours, but you’ll swap and regenerate that too. What you sell is the agent: the whole thing that reliably does the job.
And the agent is disposable, which is worth being honest about rather than romantic. You should be willing to throw any given agent away the moment a different arrangement does the job better. There’s nothing precious in it — it’s a token generator wired to some tools in some environment, run on a prompt. Its entire value is in what it does this week. Confusing the disposable engine for something sacred is how you end up defending last year’s setup instead of shipping this year’s.
The part that isn’t disposable is the person. A person knows the right thing to do — what’s worth building, when an output is wrong in a way no check caught, when to stop. That judgment is the one input you can’t commoditize, and it’s wasted on work an agent could do instead. The move that pays isn’t “replace the people.” It’s pointing a lot of disposable agents at the work so a smaller number of irreplaceable people get far more done.
So: agents are products. Build ones that do something. Keep the model and the tools swappable, because they’re commodities. And spend your people on the one thing the stack can’t do — deciding what’s worth doing.