Today on the AI Daily Brief, the next wave of human agent collaboration.

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.

First of all, thank you to today's sponsors,

robots and pencils, Zen Coder, assembly, and super intelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you want to learn more about sponsoring the show or really know anything else about the show, you can go to AIDailyief.aI. One thing I would point you to is the

newsletter, which is back. If you're ever wondering where you can find the links to all of the

articles and quotes and tweets and things that I reference, the newsletter is going to be your

best bet for that. Now, today, we are doing a long read slash big think episode, and we're getting

in a theme that's at the core of AI operations

this year. Obviously, 2026 has been all about agents actually becoming real. And they became real

because of a combination of the model advancements at the end of last year, as well as the greater

focus on harnesses, i.e. the interfaces through which we interact with agents. Through the combination

from January till now,

the way that we use AI is no longer sit there, prompt it, wait for an answer, and go off and do the rest of our work.

Instead, increasingly, it is about spinning up or managing agents that go out and produce things on our behalf,

agents that can use code to build things or solve problems, even when we're not

coders ourselves. And of course, the implications of this have been massive. Business models are

shifting as companies are no longer able to subsidize the biggest power users of AI, who can

consume hundreds of millions or even billions of tokens themselves individually in a single month.

Indeed, more broadly, we are starting to live inside a world of token shortage, where the total amount of AI that would be consumed if it could is higher than the amount of AI that is available thanks to constraints of compute. Throughout the last few weeks, we've been talking about some of these big implications. But one that we haven't mentioned for a little while now is what it means for the patterns in how we work.

At the beginning of the year, as open-claw excitement raged, it was all about Mac minis and even for some Mac studios, running 24-7 agents, doing everything you could possibly imagine,

not only automating your existing world of work, but uncovering new things that were never

...