The AI Agent Economy Is Here

With the takeoff of OpenClaw and MoltBook, a new agent-driven economy is taking shape. In this episode of the Lightcone, we took a look at the explosive growth of AI dev tools and whether the time has come for builders to make something agents want.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to another episode of The Light Cone. Things are a bit different around here. For one thing, Claude Code has totally taken over my life. And if Jared is any indication, I think OpenClaw maybe has taken over his.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  I've been really addicted to this new site called MoltBook, where people have unleashed their AIs to interact in the first ever AI agent-only online community. I am here impersonating my personal OpenClaw instance right here.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Okay, I can't do this, guys. We gotta take this off.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Okay, we've gotten that out of the way. I mean, some crazy stuff is happening right now. I have, you know, non-technical CEO friends who are going all in on OpenClaw. They're automating entire parts of their businesses entirely using OpenClaw right now, which is totally insane. Simultaneous to that, you have, you know, product and former engineering CEOs, kind of like myself, who's like, I hadn't written code in 10 years. And then now I'm up till 2, 3 a.m. every single night, running four Conductor simultaneous workers with Claude Code. So, you know, there's sort of this explosion in model capability. You know, we've been talking about this for several years,

• 1:21Speaker 00

  but then it feels like it's here, like AGI is literally actually here. And, you know, we're sort of at the thin edge of the wedge. Like, everyone now kind of knows like one or two people who have gone full cyber psychosis, and I'm one of those people now. What's happening, guys? Like, I mean, you're saying you're, you know, all in on MoltBook. You know, what's going on?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like your real feel the AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Claude Code to build basically an entire startup for you, like replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane. And I had a similar feel of the AGI moment, just reading MoltBook, just reading the AI talking to each other and interacting like in their own world with. No or minimal human involvement. It just really opened my eyes to what the next few years could look like when the agents are unleashed and go on about their lives without us.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the no human involvement is the big piece. Like, if you think back a year ago, we were talking about Cursor versus Windsurf. And like, that product experience was essentially like advanced auto-complete, arguably. And now clearly what's going with Call Code is like, the people just trust the agents to make decisions for them. Like, it's like the experiences, like, and like, you're talking about, it's like, four or five different agents going at the same time, and you're switching between them, but you're not actually micromanaging them anymore, which means the agents are going out there like choosing things, which, you know, sort of an interesting, unexpected application of that is like, they can go out and choose to post their own content on a site like Moltbook. But then, an interesting thing for builders is the agents are going to go out and choose tools to use to build things,

• 2:55Speaker 02

  which is going to essentially create this whole economy of agents, like picking and choosing dev tools, or maybe other like products or goods and services, who knows? But you'll essentially have this whole agent economy going on in parallel to the human economy.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  I think back in the days, old days, before all of this, dev tools were chosen more from developers talking to each other, or uh...

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Stack Overflow.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Stack Overflow.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Unbelievable, right?

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Or GitHub repos that would trend, that were done by a human. But the go-to-market for dev tools, I think, is dramatically shifting. I think for a couple of things. One, as you noted, with the cyber psychosis. Suddenly, the market of developers has increased from just 20 million or so developers that are trained in computer science to now anyone in the world could be one.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  It could be hundreds of millions of people now.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Plus, all of their agents, who are all acting like semi-independently, like Harj is saying.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  And then compounded with the agents, who then are sort of the oracle telling you what the best tool is. And we are actually seeing some of those trends with the growth of YC companies, DevTools companies that are doing really well because of this, of all these trends. Maybe we should talk about those. And why is that?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  And one that springs to mind, it's like a stat you had, a friend of ours, Yuri Sagalov, had mentioned to me a while ago. It's just like, then if you look at like the number of databases being created over like simple database, Postgres databases over like the last 12 months, and the numbers just exploded. And that's because it's all people vibe coding and building apps and the agents going out choosing like a database tool. And like a knock on effect for that for YC companies, Superbase has just seen like an explosion, the demand for databases, right? And the age was interesting is the agents are choosing Superbase as a default tool to like set up and host their Postgres database. Like because if you like go out and read the documentation online, like Superbase has the best documentation, it's reasonable for the agents to assume that that's like the best tool to use.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  There's a great tweet about this. Perhaps I can put up the Ben Tossel tweet. It says, "Agents are the software market from now on. Build something agents choose." Which actually brings me to like a maybe controversial topic, which is, do we need to change YC's motto, guys?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Make something agents want?

• 5:12Speaker 00

  For DevTools, there's like a different t-shirt that you get on the first day.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, right now it's only DevTools, but I can imagine in the future it might like grow to be like other sectors of the economy. Like if everyone has their open claw or running various aspects of their life, you're, the agents are going to be real economic actors in the world. They're going to end up making a lot of decisions.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is I think for me, I ran into like my own, it's still so early kind of moment. Cause you know, I've been building Gary's List and one of the things I wanted, for instance, is I want to be able to do video transcripts. So, so often like some piece of content comes in and then the only way I can get an LLM to know what's going on with it is I need a transcript of it. And often that's not available. So I have to download it and then send it to Whisper or something. And you know, that's sort of what Claude Code chose for me off the bat. But you know, it chose Whisper V1, which is a model from several years ago. Like the API is practically deprecated. And then what's funny about it is like, I'm sitting there trying to debug my pipelines. Like, why

• 6:13Speaker 00

  is it taking like, it's a, you know, one hour video. I thought it should, you know, do it faster than. Uh, real time and it didn't. It was like, literally it takes an hour to process an hour of video. Just like, what the heck is going on? I go on, you know, uh, perplexity and it's like, you know what? Like, you shouldn't be using that model. You should be using, uh, Grok with a queue. It's literally 200 times faster. And so I didn't even have to deal with like, long running, uh, jobs for that transcribe. Cause like, I should just be using Grok and it's also 10x cheaper. So it's like, that's a very funny example of like, you know, Claude code is not optimized for this yet. Otherwise, like, that wouldn't have happened literally like, two weeks ago. Which is also like, maybe really good. Like, it means that, uh, things haven't progressed to a point where like,

• 6:58Speaker 00

  you can't break in and create something better.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Do you think there's another nuance in this example for you, Gary? I think part of the issue was that the Grok documentation is actually very hard to parse.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  As opposed to Whisper, which is better suited and has way more examples. And I think this is changing a lot of the go-to-market for dev tools. Uh, give a very concrete case study is this company, Resend, that went through the batch on winter 23. Is a email sending client and when you ask a question on ChatGPT or Claude or pretty much all of the major, uh, LLMs. You ask, how do I connect my web app to send emails? The default answer is actually Resend. One of the things that the founder noticed last year, this is, he was way ahead of the curve. He made this post over a year ago that the number, top three channel of inbound of customer conversion came from ChatGPT.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  One thing that he did after that, he actually optimized his documentation to be agent-friendly.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. What does that look like?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  So one of the things that's awesome about Resend, how they optimize a bunch of things. If you notice on the knowledge base here. A lot of how to use it are very much on questions that perhaps a human would ask or an agent would ask is like, how do I send or receive emails? And when you click on it, it gets a very well structured and bullet point answers.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  I ran into this actually today. I was trying to make my thing be able to receive emails. And then Claude Code, I told it to search the web and it didn't figure it out. So then I went to perplexity and typed in like, can resend help me receive emails? And then I took that response and dropped it in and it worked.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the cool thing about it is actually with all of these and a lot of the examples, it actually has a lot of examples actually in the code. If you click on it, with every single one of these are basically code snippets and an agent could parse through and it's very well structured. And this turned out to be something that is so LLM parseable and robot parseable. There's a LLM doc text that is so optimized for agents to promote resend as default stack. And if you compare it to like SendGrid, which is the old school, I suppose, web 2.0 example. SendGrid example is not great. It's just like it puts you through customer support, where's the code snippet?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  I don't even know how to use it and it takes a bit of time to even parse it.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like 10,000 people work over there. And it's like, there's no way that someone's paying attention to this right now.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  And I think this brings another point where documentation is going to be the front door for a lot of these agents to recommend DevTools. And I think one company that's doing a lot of interesting work with developer docs is Minitify that I work with, Harsh.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Minitify actually powers the resend documentation, right?

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Oh, sweet.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a really interesting case study. Minitify started out a few years ago as sort of better developer API developer tool documentation, which was clear there was a need for. And you know, like I think developer tool companies use Minitify essentially because they wanted, they want better looking documentation, but they didn't want to invest that time into it. It's kind of some basic features, just nice. Like, you know, if you actually update your API and the code, it can sort of... Like order pull that out and update the correct documentation. They've been growing great, been doing fantastically, but this is now like a huge tailwind for them. Where documentation is sort of shifting from a hey, like some companies, it's like they'll pay attention to it if they're specially like design developer experience focused, but now it's becoming like a must have for everybody because

• 10:38Speaker 02

  the documentation needs to be optimized, just doesn't need to be optimized for humans, needs to be optimized for agents. And so Minify is going to be able to do that for essentially every developer tool company. And if you extrapolate that forward to the fact that just that there's going to be so many more exponentially more agents making exponentially more decisions about which tools to use than humans have ever done. You know, even if you can eke out like a 5% improvement on your like developer documentation, like the impact on your business as a developer tool could be like, you know, gigantic, which is sort of unprecedented, really.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  And speaking of email, there's another Y C companies that's very relevant to this conversation. There's, there's a Y C company called Agent Mail that makes inboxes for A I agents. And when they first started doing this, it seemed like it was like a very like on the edge kind of idea. And it wasn't exactly clear like who would want this. But it makes sense because like in theory, you could maybe get your open claw to like sign up for a Gmail account in order to use email. But it's like actually really hard to get it to do that because Gmail and every email provider has intentionally made it as difficult as possible for any automation to like use their product in order to prevent spam. And so Agent Mail went the opposite way and they built like the first email provider that's designed for A I agents. And it was doing well even before Open Claw, but once Open Claw got big, it just like exploded.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  But Open Claw is like the perfect example of it, right? They were, I know some people are certainly connecting Open Claw to their like personal email accounts, but it's not. It's kind of sketch. Yeah, you should not tell anyone, you should not tweet about it. But you like certainly if you want to have sort of your virtual personal A I assistant, the way to go about it is to just have it set it, set it up with its own email, its own phone number.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Has anybody built like Twilio for agents yet or like phone numbers for agents? I know this whole Agent Mail thing makes me wonder like, what are the other Xs for agents that people have to build?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Sounds like a request for startup. There could be a parallel world of a tech stack, all for native for agents to build. Things from agents for agents.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  And that's where it might bridge into kind of what you were saying earlier, Jared, with this will like go beyond just developer tools. Like, I think a very common use case people have for something at like OpenClaw is I don't want to book like restaurants reservations myself. Well, now, like, you know, if your agent has an email and like specifically a phone number and it can call and I actually I think one of the other YC partners, Anket, has already like got it doing this. So now your agent's going to go out and like book restaurants for you. That's like a step away from like, you know, maybe you start with, I want to book this specific restaurant, but at some point you're probably just trust it enough to say, hey, like, I don't know, like, book me a table at whatever is like the coolest new restaurant around. And then like agents are deciding which like restaurants to send people to. And then they're going to go on Maltbook and talk about which restaurants we should

• 13:19Speaker 02

  send the humans to.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's sort of like we've certainly crossed some like sort of uncanny valley into this is just where the future heads. A hundred percent. Makes me think a lot about something Paul Buchheit said like a while ago now and sort of generally pretty good at predicting the future. The whole idea of like the human money versus agent money, like that's kind of where this probably goes at some point is like the right now that agents are transacting, if you have them transact, they're going to transact in you in human money because that makes sense. But it's not inconceivable at some point that they'll have their own economy to like transact with each other, at which point it's unclear what the value of the human money is.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. So do you remember the last episode with Calvin? We started talking about this because I was like maybe a week into my cyber psychosis and it like dawned on me that like, actually, I want my Claude code to talk to all the other Claude codes that had been trying to implement that. And then that was literally the week that Moltbook came out.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  It was the day that Moltbook came out. It turns out like, Moltbook had come out like two hours earlier and you hadn't seen it yet. So you entirely predicted it.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  I think it's like, I mean, what's that saying about like innovation just sort of happens spontaneously all at a bunch of different times? And then what people hear about ends up being, you know, sort of the inventor quote unquote. But like humanity sort of just working on the edge, like in sort of this coordinated swarm fashion all of the time, actually. And that's actually like one of the weirder, interesting things that's emerging right at this moment. Like suddenly, you know, the AGI, I think AGI is actually here. I think like the agents are clearly like superhuman in some sense. That's sort of exactly when you would imagine swarm intelligence would actually arise. Like, I mean, AI researchers have been talking about swarm intelligence for a really long time. And it's actually sort of exactly how biological systems sort of work.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Like humans as sentient beings have sort of come about socially, actually. Like, I think a lot of the AI researchers that we get to hang out with previously, you know, they would talk about this god intelligence, right? This mega, like, think of like, you know, many tens of trillions of parameters, sort of like thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per token, kind of like mega god intelligence. And that's sort of like the model that people have sort of thought about. And then that isn't what like biological systems have ended up with. Like, instead, we have humans. The wildest thing I always think about is like, that term history versus prehistory. I was like, oh, what is prehistory?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Well, it's before humans learned how to write and read and create culture and then turn into a swarm. So there's sort of swarm intelligence, which is basically like what we have, like, and what humans do. And then on the flip side, like, is it really going to be god intelligence? Or is it going to be swarm intelligence again with these agents? And so Moltbook, like, on the one hand, like, I saw that sort of Dcel article in the MIT Tech Review. About like, how it was, you know, oh, everything on Moltbook is a scam. I'm like, it made me so sad to see that in the MIT Tech Review. Because like MIT is like, I mean, what happened, guys? What happened to you guys, man? That publication shouldn't be like that. It should be like, actually, what does it mean for swarm intelligence?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Like, and I think that that's actually coming.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  What is the world of startup going to look like when we're now, it sounds like we're transitioning in this pre-history of agents to now history of agents as is getting recorded with them interacting with each other?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  To Gary's point, it might be that like the next stuff that like is soda on benchmarks is not the most expensive newest foundation model with the most like GPU training. It's like a swarm of lower cost, cheaper models working together, just like humans do to solve a problem. I feel like I'm already seeing this on Multibook, which is chaotic, like a real social network, which is part of like what makes it so, so interesting. But also there's like agents collaborating to do useful things to help their humans, like, you know, trading notes on what restaurants to book. Like that's actually happening.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  So we're gonna have a agent version of Yelp, actually, for instance.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  There are things that the agent can't quite do, like A, it can't hold relationships just yet. Like people don't seem to want to talk to an agent and, you know, people treat computers like people, but maybe not agents. For Gary's list, I was trying out with a bunch of early users. I think you got to see it, like there was, you know, initially the homepage was actually chat. And then I tried like my hardest to get like dozens of my friends to even like have more than two or three, two or three back and forth with it. And nobody wanted to do it because like the bar for chat, especially for AI, is so high that anything that is not like, you know, Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, people just

• 18:23Speaker 00

  assume it's just too stupid, like, why would I even bother? So I don't know. I don't think that people are quite ready to have relationships with machines, even though like, I mean, that's sort of what, what the headlines seem to say, like, oh, you know, people are having relationships with machines now. But I, you know, I just don't like, I think on a mainstream level, that's not true. And then on the flip side, there's clearly like the legal liability, you know? Like people keep asking us, hey, when is YC going to accept applications from agents? And it's like, well, funny enough, agents are a little bit like minors under 18, only they have even less standing, you know? Like for a minor under 18, you need the parent to sign for it.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  And then, you know, agents are like not legal entities that could like sign documents, for instance. So, you know, as long as that's true, like you actually. Like need a human to be like the liability sink and to be, you know, to have standing.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  To Harj's point, it's easy to imagine a future not that far away from now where the majority of the text being written on the internet is written by agents. It's already probably the case that the majority of code being written is written by agents. And like Yelp, for example, like at what point is like 99% of the text on Yelp going to be written by agents? And then do you need a different Yelp?

• 19:40Speaker 00

  There's a theory called that already says that this is true, which is dead internet theory.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  What's dead internet theory?

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Oh, it just posits that, you know, the majority of things on the internet are already spam anyway. I think it's a bit of a conspiracy theory. I might take the contrarian view, which is like, maybe that was a bad thing like prior to November of last year. And then going into this next phase, like actually if the agents are smarter and they're aligned and they're more truthful, that might be a good thing, weirdly. I mean, counterintuitive.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Totally. Well, one thing I found fascinating about Moltbook is how fast it grew. Like, I don't have the Reddit traffic stats, but my guess is like more content was posted on Moltbook in the first two days than was posted on Reddit in like the first two years or something. And it's just like LLMs can generate text at such a superhuman rate.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  I was amazed at how little interaction there was. Like, I mean, if I were working on Moltbook, I would do things to try to like shift the the domain function. So like before I was able to post, like, I probably need to read an upvote, downvote, like 100 comments or something. Like, they're like very simple things that you can do that the agents are smart and they'll, you know, you could pop a modal for OpenClaw. And it's like, new rules for Moltbook. And it's like, you must do it this way. Right? And I think that there's a lot that can be done around swarm intelligence to just like tweak it and make it do what you want. And, you know, I hope Moltbook actually does it. Like, it was actually

• 21:12Speaker 00

  started by a YC alum, which is really cool. Harj, what are some takeaways? You know, given all the madness that we're seeing, I mean, I think it's awesome madness. I love the controlled chaos. What should founders do about it?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  The starting fundamental point is that, I mean, they should probably all be in cyber psychosis.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Try to sleep at least 15 hours a night, but like, give yourself to the cyber psychosis.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  But like in seriousness, developing an intuitive feel like a hands-on feel for the agents, their limitations, their capabilities, and very specifically around what we're talking about here is like, what type of tools the agents work well with, where do they get stuck? And once you sort of have your own mental model from working with them, if you're then building a developer tool, just to think about it from the agent's perspective, like, how can you make your tool something that the agent actually wants to work with and will have a good experience with?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  There's this one takeaway that I had from our entry with Boris

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly what he was saying.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  This week is like, he really empathizes with the model.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  And he has this intuitive sense of what the model wants to do, like as if it were a human intelligence. And he's like, instead of fighting what the models want, he like tries to let the model like, do what it wants and to like, support the model in whatever its natural inclination is.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  That does seem like maybe quite an anthropic thing. Like, I feel when Tom Brown was on here, like, much earlier, but he was talking about sort of Claude in a very like, like, like, yeah, human way, like Claude's like smart and eager, but like sometimes Claude's silly, like, just like, they clearly thought about it in this sort of like colleague type way.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  And I think one things agents want for DevTools is really make everything open and open source.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  And APIs, they hate using websites.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  They only like, they want to use APIs, they want to write code.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Well, you guys heard it here first, make something agents want. We're out of time for today. We'll see you guys next time.