# Apps After Agents | Bricolage

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https://bricolage.io/apps-after-agents/

Another excellent article from Kyle.

> Agents are automation. That’s not a metaphor — it’s a category. What tractors did to farming, what robots did to manufacturing, what spreadsheets did to bookkeeping, agents are doing to knowledge work: taking tasks that required human judgment and making them executable by machine.
> 
> This means we don’t have to speculate how agents will play out in software. We have 150 years of data on what automation does and doesn’t absorb.
> 
> The pattern is consistent across every wave: routine work gets automated; non-routine work resists. In the US, agriculture’s share of the workforce went from 41% in 1900 to 2% today — but the remaining 2% aren’t doing what the 41% did. They’re doing crop planning, pest diagnosis, equipment decisions — judgment calls that tractors couldn’t absorb. ATMs automated most routine teller duties, yet teller employment initially grew through the 2000s — automation reduced per-branch costs, enabling more branches. The tellers who remained did relationship management, fraud detection, problem resolution. Every wave shifts the boundary between routine and non-routine, creates new categories of work, restructures rather than simply replaces.