DOP 348: Now It's Time to Panic

#348: Something flipped this year. Chatbots were a toy. Useful sometimes, but a toy. Agents are not. Agents take actions, hold credentials, write code, move Kanban cards, and run on cron schedules. The window between this is interesting and this is existential has closed faster than cloud, faster than Kubernetes, faster than any prior shift.

Viktor’s read is blunt. One person can now build a bigger business than most mid-size companies have ever managed. That is not hyperbole – that is a description of what is already happening with a handful of solo-built projects shipping in weeks what used to take a hundred-person org years. The thesis: panic. Not because the sky is falling, but because larger companies cannot turn around overnight, and the gap between the people who get this and the people who are still scheduling meetings about scheduling meetings is widening every week.

The conversation walks through what each big provider is actually doing. AWS is not pretending to compete on models – they want the inference revenue. Microsoft is lost in Copilot button-stuffing. Google is quietly winning on three layers at once: TPUs, models, and inference infrastructure. Anthropic is on the path to becoming the next defining IPO, while OpenAI looks like a place to take money out of, not put more in. The Linux Foundation’s new Agentic AI foundation got Anthropic’s MCP, Block’s Goose, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md spec. Viktor’s reaction: those are heavy hitters donating not very much.

Then it gets practical. Vendor-provided agents are like hiring a genius engineer who knows nothing about your company. Public skills are mostly nonsense – if it is in public training data, the model already knows it; what is missing is everything specific to you, which is exactly what no public skill can provide. OWASP just published an Agentic AI Top 10 and most of it is least-privilege rebranded for agents. The cost story is also not what the marketing says: a 00 monthly subscription will not last a day for anyone working full-time with agents. There is a true story in here about a leaked token that turned a 00 monthly spend into 5,000 in two days.

The hardest part of the episode is the part nobody likes hearing. If your output stays the same in 2026, you are in trouble. If you multiply your output, you are fine. Companies have always wanted to do more than they could afford to do. Now they can. The middle is where careers used to live. The middle is where the cuts are going.