Something has really shifted since the start of 2026.

I remember back in December, the likes of Karpathy & Ilya were appearing on the Dwarkesh podcast and the prevailing sentiment was that “AI isnt as good as we thought it would be”, that wed “need to rethink from the bottom” - that the bubble might pop.

Fast forward like 90 days, now suddenly my most devout, purist-developer friends have all said they’ve flipped from writing 80% of their code (and letting Claude do the other 20%) to 20/80 the other way.

OpenClaw hit the mainstream in Jan and (while still sketchy / plenty of serious security concerns to solve) it blew down the floodgates to a whole new world. Now every YC company is building ‘agentic commerce’ and ‘modern agentcy’ models.

Of course much of this is fraught with MLM-style ‘you can run a $1M 1-man business from your computer on autopilot’ sleeze and slop so it’s a bit hard to discern what it hype vs real reality-bending stuff.

But what I can tell you is that for me… I can now see it.
It’s finally become part of my workflow.
I now have a small fleet of custom agents that do a lot of my work for me.

One example: I recently set up a Claude Cowork populated that can search influencer directories for me to find the exact best creators for any brand:

This is a GIF of my computer on autopilot - load in some context about my preferences + some SOPs and Claude can do it by itself.

A task that would typically take an influencer marketing manager 1-3 weeks to do (and $thousands to bill) can theoretically be done better in minutes with a few clicks.

There is some truth when they say that we are living through a phase shift in how business gets done. The winners will likely be the ones who can adopt early and move fast (the incumbents will be incentivized to hold onto their old systems for as long as they can)

Another example: Notion recently launched their own agent workflows

You can easily connect things like your CRM (Hubspot), accounting/finances, meeting notes, documentation, project management tools (Linear), calendar, email in a few seconds and interact with it via Slack.

Which means I can now DM my personal assistant in Slack and ask it what we quoted a particular client, book meetings for me, draft emails kick off project tasks, etc:

(For the record, OpenClaw essentially does this but at a much larger, more autonomous, admittedly more haphazard scale)

All to say… the hype is to be believed in some capacity. And we are so early.

I consider myself pretty close to the edge on this stuff and I am just starting to come to terms with just how big this will be. It has changed my whole perspective on how businesses can look.

It feels a bit like The Wizard of Oz black-n-white to oolor moment.
If you are are agency/service style business the value prop is that you can now:

I will be writing more about this as it develops, sharing my thoughts, my tinkerings, how I think people like me can be leveraging this stuff.

But the short version is: the margin compression is coming for service businesses (whether they like it or not). The question is whether you're the one compressing it or the one getting compressed.

TTYL,
Ramsey