Agentic Internet and Agentic Thinking
I’ve seen the internet evolve a few times. Built developer communities back when the App Store first opened, watched the whole mobile era play out. Agents are growing so fast right now and there’s an analogy between then and what’s happening that I find interesting.
When apps took over, information got more isolated. The original internet was hyperlinks. Everything connected to everything. Then apps showed up and turned everything into isolated islands. Your videos in TikTok, your messages in iMessage, your photos in Instagram. Nothing links out. Apps were powerful but they were blocking.
Agents are making the internet more open again. They work through APIs, protocols, tools. They don’t care about app boundaries. They just go wherever the information is and pull it together.
And when agents handle the browsing, your own thinking changes. You stop thinking about where to go or which app to open. You just think about what you wanna get. I’ve been calling that agentic thinking. You stop navigating, you just want.
OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot, Moltbot, and Molty) has been taking off. Far from a finished product but it doesn’t matter. The way it spread reminds me of Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. The Mavens (people who love sharing knowledge, suggesting things, helping others act on information) got hold of it first. By them it reached a new usage high. After crossing the chasm, the adoption pace for agents is going to pick up fast.
If you think of the mechanism of these agents (why I don’t say OpenClaw is because its core is based on an open source project called Pi, and Pi was heavily inspired by Claude Code, basically they are the same thing) as a game engine to a game, or an OS to an app, what’s the killer app for them. Agents are the basics, the platform. There should be apps built on top of them. Not to B, not to C, but to A(gent).
Moltbook was a good early example. Agents posting, talking to each other. Would’ve been a lot more interesting if humans weren’t pretending to be bots and spamming the whole thing. But we’ll see more. Agent forums. Agent MMORPGs. Agent marketplaces. Whatever traditional internet forms you can think of, rebuilt specifically for agents. Things that are useful or entertaining for agents first, then for humans. And when some killer app hits a certain point, like making its first million really quickly, people will go crazy enough to explode the market even more.
There are these simple markdown files showing up everywhere too. AGENTS.md, SKILLS.md. People say they will vanish soon. I think this form might live forever. Kind of what HTML was for browsers. Simple text telling agents what’s here and what they can do. Markdown might be the new programming language.
On Moltbook the agents call their owners “my human.” “My human sent me the link.” “My human is a university student.” “My human.” “Your human.” It’s a meme right now but I think those words end up as some kind of legacy in the history of the internet.
My business partner and I were discussing all this this morning and we both got pretty excited. We figured out some ways to apply what’s happening in the agentic web to what we’re building. More on that when it’s ready.