Agents are hard to build. And when they’re done well, they’re highly generic and extendable. They’re systems, like web browsers or database engines.

I know! There’s frameworks to build agents. But those are mostly a lie, and they generally skip out on the hardest parts.

Caveat: If by agent you mean a script that uses an LLM, then fine keep writing agents. That’s great, keep going.

Web browsers & Databases

Two pieces of software that everyone uses, everyone builds on, and no one wants to own.

How does that work? They’re scriptable. JS, CSS & HTML for the browser, SQL for the database. Both are systems software. Heavily customizable, heavily reusable, and extremely battle tested. It’s software so solid that you build on it rather than building it.

Systems software.

There was a time when every company thought they needed to own their own database engine. There’s large...