Could the Future Already Be Here?
Lately, the word I hear and read the most is agent. How did this topic become so prominent? Is everyone talking about "Claude," "AI models," or "agents," or is it just my algorithm feeding me these topics?
Lately, the word I hear and read the most is agent. How did this topic become so prominent? Is everyone talking about “Claude,” “AI models,” or “agents,” or is it just my algorithm feeding me these topics?
Or is it just selective perception?
Yes, it might be hard to swallow, but it’s completely true: it’s the first option. Maybe not the whole world is talking about agents, but a big chunk of the tech world certainly is. While we’re debating whether we’re ready for agents or not, they’ve actually arrived, and we’re only just beginning to notice.
For those who might not be as into tech or AI as I am, the topic might just be about chatting with ChatGPT or offloading some tedious tasks (like translations, text edits, spell checks, etc.). In that case, you might be thinking, “Oh come on, who knows when these agents will actually arrive? When will the infrastructure be ready for this?”
But in reality, the foundations for the infrastructures these agents will work on were laid a long time ago. I’m not talking about LLM models, but the infrastructures for what we might call “agentic” tasks. Exactly 16 months ago, in January 2025, the SendAI Hackathon was held; AI and agentic projects on the Solana network were discussed, and their foundations were laid.
In that hackathon, which featured over 400 projects, AgentiPy won first place in the “Agents Infra” category. It was an open-source infrastructure tool that connected AI agents written in Python to Solana.
Because the agents that are ready and even starting to be used today were built and brought to life on the ideas and infrastructures provided by projects like AgentiPy that participated in that hackathon.
The infrastructures laid back then are now at our service, actively used not just by institutions but by us as well.
Does the widespread nature of this technology seem unbelievable, especially to those outside this sector?
In that case, let me introduce you to “Manfred,” an agent with a tax ID. ClawBank’s agent “Manfred” independently established a U.S. company and obtained a tax identification number from the IRS, all without human intervention.
Or I could tell you about the first app I developed with Replit’s Agent 4 in just a few hours over a weekend, thanks to the free usage rights offered during Replit’s 10th-anniversary celebrations.
It’s a personalized app for my own needs, with weekly planning, meals, recipes, shopping lists, calorie and other nutritional values tracking, and even automatically adding my weekly recurring routine tasks to my calendar. Plus, it ensures that the ingredients in the recipes are ones you can actually find in Turkey.
On top of all this, while it might not have been an agent, I had my first voice chatbot call last week. Outlier AI’s voice chatbot called me, saying it wanted to discuss my account with their systems. When I said I wasn’t available, it asked when I would be. We continued after I mentioned we were on Turkey time and scheduled a meeting for this week during the day in Turkey time. It was my first conversation with a system that sounded like a real human voice, listened to me, understood, and responded accordingly, yet wasn’t human.
For those who think these topics are in the distant future, heads up.
Thanks to hackathons like SendAI, projects and infrastructures like AgentiPy, Huma, and Arf, today Western Union can announce its settlement infrastructure developed on Solana as an alternative to SWIFT. A 175-year-old company is stepping outside the traditional banking system.
At the Consensus conference in Miami from May 5-7, “Agentic Commerce” was one of the main themes of the year. These technologies, whose seeds were actually planted much earlier, are now at the center of the agenda.
Technology is racing like a roller coaster, moving forward without pause or slowing down, and no matter what we do, our human awareness lags a bit behind.
When weekly AI newsletters can headline “the top 40 news stories,” how can we keep up with this pace?
More importantly, when do you think we’ll realize that the future we thought was coming soon is actually already here?
Note: By the way, I can’t help but mention the shock my generation feels, having imagined a life with flying cars, cooking robots, and something like The Jetsons, only to find that AI agents have quietly taken a seat to do white-collar jobs. :)