TinyFish | More from Vision

TinyFish | More from Vision

Vision

CURRENT

A journal for living in the agentic age

Practitioner's Corner

Thursday, June 25

ISSUE #35

Vision

We spent this issue pulling apart something nobody thinks about: the click. When a person clicks a button, they carry context the browser never had to record. Intent, authority, the judgment that this action should happen now. Agents perform the same gesture and none of that travels with it. The web assumed someone was sitting there. What we didn't expect is where the fixes are arriving first: payments and compliance, the domains where confused delegation costs real money. Better models won't solve this. The accountability infrastructure has to exist before agents can be trusted with anything that matters.

Thursday, June 25

ISSUE #35

Vision

We spent this issue pulling apart something nobody thinks about: the click. When a person clicks a button, they carry context the browser never had to record. Intent, authority, the judgment that this action should happen now. Agents perform the same gesture and none of that travels with it. The web assumed someone was sitting there. What we didn't expect is where the fixes are arriving first: payments and compliance, the domains where confused delegation costs real money. Better models won't solve this. The accountability infrastructure has to exist before agents can be trusted with anything that matters.

Past Articles

June — Issue #34

The Conditions for Meaning

Individual Shift / Organizational Conditions

The Conditions for Meaning

Meaningful AI-augmented work depends on specific design choices most organizations are making by accident, with compounding consequences.

The Taste You Didn't Earn

Individual Shift / Organizational Conditions

The Taste You Didn't Earn

Reviewing AI outputs builds real pattern recognition, but it may be a different thing than the domain expertise it resembles.

What Smoothness Costs

The Texture Problem

What Smoothness Costs

Organizations automating knowledge work are stripping out the friction where judgment forms, and most don't realize it until the expertise is gone.

June — Issue #33

Monitoring the Monitors

Lessons and Designs

Monitoring the Monitors

What would an early warning system for degrading human oversight actually look like, and why is it so hard to build?

What Aviation Built After It Noticed the Problem

Lessons and Designs

What Aviation Built After It Noticed the Problem

Aviation built concrete measurement infrastructure before its automation countermeasures. Enterprise AI skipped that step entirely.

The Core Problem

Smooth AI assistance decouples confidence from accuracy at the individual level, then compounds into organizational blind spots that existing oversight cannot detect.

June — Issue #32

What the Six Percent Are Doing Differently

Two Consequences

What the Six Percent Are Doing Differently

The few organizations redesigning work around agents share a method: decompose workflows first, then assign decision rights deliberately.

Where Does Judgment Come From Now?

Two Consequences

Where Does Judgment Come From Now?

As agents absorb the routine tasks that built professional intuition, the pipeline for developing judgment quietly thins.

The Boring Turn

The Boring Future

The Boring Turn

Enterprise AI agents are crossing from exciting to invisible, and the hardest questions only surface after the technology stops being the conversation.

June — Issue #31

When Smooth Work Feels Like Good Work

Window and Mechanism

When Smooth Work Feels Like Good Work

AI makes work feel fluent, and humans read fluency as accuracy. Designing around this cognitive mechanism matters more than adding checkpoints.

What the Maturity Gap Is Actually For

Window and Mechanism

What the Maturity Gap Is Actually For

The gap between AI piloting and autonomy is a fleeting window to build evaluation infrastructure before operational knowledge disappears.

The Expertise You're Losing Is the Expertise You'd Need to Notice

Expertise Decay

The Expertise You're Losing Is the Expertise You'd Need to Notice

Organizations lose the capacity to detect expertise erosion on the same timeline they lose the expertise itself, and the recursion is already underway.

May — Issue #30

The Discovery Problem No One Has Solved

Two Consequences

The Discovery Problem No One Has Solved

Agents can talk to each other but cannot find each other, and history shows discovery layers rarely stay neutral without deliberate design.

Agent-First Design and the Fate of Human-Experience Moats

Two Consequences

Agent-First Design and the Fate of Human-Experience Moats

When agents evaluate services at machine speed, competitive advantage migrates to invisible properties no marketing team has learned to measure.

The Indifferent Buyer

The Inverted Audience

The Indifferent Buyer

When the buyer has no eyes or impulses, the web's trillion-dollar persuasion economy loses its audience and commerce rewires around machine legibility.

May — Issue #29

What the Junior Analyst Knew

Two Defaults Hiding in Plain Sight

What the Junior Analyst Knew

Automating entry-level work doesn't just thin the talent pipeline—it removes the institutional feedback loop organizations never knew they depended on.

The Pilot That Worked

Two Defaults Hiding in Plain Sight

The Pilot That Worked

Successful AI pilots quietly encode current workflows as permanent infrastructure, closing the window for organizational redesign before anyone notices.

The Architecture of Foregone Conclusions

The Anchor Argument

The Architecture of Foregone Conclusions

Temporary infrastructure choices are calcifying into permanent architecture faster than governance can respond, and the window for intentional design is closing.

May — Issue #28

Why Oversight Feels Like Loss

Why Oversight Feels Like Loss

Shifting from doing work to overseeing AI replicates a familiar loss of craft identity that better training alone cannot resolve.

Where Meaning Hides Inside Work

Where Meaning Hides Inside Work

Workers' resistance to automating enjoyable tasks reveals where meaning lives in work and where agent deployment will meet friction.

The Signal in the Satisfaction Gap

The Paradox Framed

The Signal in the Satisfaction Gap

Rising productivity plus falling engagement signals a work design problem enterprises must solve before agent orchestration roles are built by default.

May — Issue #27

The Platform Without an Audience

What Breaks Next

The Platform Without an Audience

When your customer is software, ads, loyalty programs, and storefronts lose their audience. What's left?

The Liability Vacuum

What Breaks Next

The Liability Vacuum

Agents can spend money but can't be sued. The accountability framework is still a draft while commerce rolls forward.

The Scaffolding Nobody Voted On

The Core Reframe

The Scaffolding Nobody Voted On

Agents are quietly gaining wallets, identities, and credit limits while nobody debates what economic participation means without wanting.

April — Issue #26

How to Divide What You Haven't Done

Two Implications

How to Divide What You Haven't Done

Breaking complex work into agent-sized pieces requires deep domain intuition that automation itself is quietly eroding.

The Foreman Problem

Two Implications

The Foreman Problem

Supervising agents that act autonomously demands a cognitive discipline we haven't named, trained for, or even fully recognized.

The Consequences Nobody Designed For

The Core Parallel

The Consequences Nobody Designed For

Assembly lines split craft from quality control a century ago—multi-agent AI is doing the same to knowledge work now.

April — Issue #25

Agents Don't Browse

Agents Don't Browse

The SEO playbook assumed browsers who wander. Agents that execute purchases break the analogy where it matters most.

The Web Is Learning to Talk Back

The Web Is Learning to Talk Back

From static text files to live queryable endpoints, websites are quietly rebuilding themselves to serve non-human visitors.

When the Web's Visitors Start Buying

The Second Front Door

When the Web's Visitors Start Buying

The web built infrastructure for visitors that read. Its new visitors spend.

April — Issue #24

How Do You Sell Something That Succeeds by Vanishing?

How Do You Sell Something That Succeeds by Vanishing?

Agents succeed by disappearing, but brands need visibility. The commercial paradox reshaping pricing, bundling, and loyalty.

The 600 Agents Nobody Hired

The 600 Agents Nobody Hired

When the most valuable agents are the ones nobody notices, oversight loses the friction it always depended on.

When the Thing That Disappears Is the Thing That Decides

When the Thing That Disappears Is the Thing That Decides

Agents are sliding from branded products to invisible infrastructure, but invisible judgment isn't invisible plumbing—and governance always arrives late.

April — Issue #23

PwC's Hourglass Org Runs on a Reservoir It Can't Refill

Two Bets on What Replaces It

PwC's Hourglass Org Runs on a Reservoir It Can't Refill

PwC's generalist workforce model runs on deep specialists. What happens when nobody goes deep first?

IBM Bets That Watching Builds Knowing

Two Bets on What Replaces It

IBM Bets That Watching Builds Knowing

Can reviewing AI output build the same expertise as years of hands-on failure? IBM's hiring surge tests that bet.

The Infrastructure Nobody Budgeted For

The Missing Rung

The Infrastructure Nobody Budgeted For

Organizations are quietly draining the reservoir that produces experienced practitioners, and they won't notice until it's empty.

March — Issue #22

The Pressure Gradient

Two Faces of It

The Pressure Gradient

Business units and security teams aren't misaligned on AI agents—their reward structures are.

Who Answers for the Agent

Two Faces of It

Who Answers for the Agent

When agents act without judgment, accountability lands on a role that doesn't exist yet.

The Org Chart Nobody Drew

The Structural Problem

The Org Chart Nobody Drew

Enterprises aren't just deploying agents without oversight—they're accidentally building a parallel workforce faster than anyone can govern it.

March — Issue #21

Who Decides What an Agent Can Trust?

New Rules, New Gatekeepers

Who Decides What an Agent Can Trust?

Agent commerce needs machine-readable trust, and whoever defines it becomes the infrastructure nobody can remove.

When the Customer Has No Eyes

New Rules, New Gatekeepers

When the Customer Has No Eyes

When AI agents replace human browsing, businesses that can't be parsed don't get penalized—they vanish entirely.

What Breaks When the Buyer Has No Brain to Hack

The Persuasion Stack

What Breaks When the Buyer Has No Brain to Hack

The commercial web is a persuasion machine disguised as an information network, and agents are calling the bluff.

March — Issue #20

The Maintenance Phase

Two Consequences

The Maintenance Phase

Seventy percent of successful AI investment goes to people, not technology. The unglamorous work decides everything.

The Feature, Not the Product

Two Consequences

The Feature, Not the Product

Agents are being absorbed into platforms like databases before them. The value is migrating to infrastructure.

The Fastest Boring in Tech History

The Boring Inflection

The Fastest Boring in Tech History

Agents are becoming infrastructure at unprecedented speed, but organizations may be absorbing the technology faster than they understand it.

March — Issue #19

What Stops Being Found When Every Agent Agrees

Default Settings

What Stops Being Found When Every Agent Agrees

When every agent optimizes the same way, the web's weird, wonderful long tail quietly stops being discoverable at all.

What Counts as Good When Agents Decide

Default Settings

What Counts as Good When Agents Decide

AI shopping agents don't just filter products—their opaque criteria quietly harden into the operative definition of quality itself.

The Rise of Ghost Institutions

The Rise of Ghost Institutions

AI agents are encoding institutional taste at massive scale, and nobody involved in building them recognizes they're making aesthetic judgments.

March — Issue #18

Secondary interfaces always decay. What happens when humans prefer the agent's door because it wasn't designed against them?

The Honest Interface

The Honest Interface

Dark patterns can't survive serialization. When agents replace visual interfaces, manipulation loses its medium.

The Honest Version We Built for Machines

The Honest Version We Built for Machines

Building an honest interface for agents accidentally exposes what the human-facing web was designed to hide all along.

February — Issue #17

When Judgment Stops Being Scarce

The Professional Services Threshold

When Judgment Stops Being Scarce

Professional judgment is splitting into pattern-matching that scales infinitely and accountability that never will, rewriting how firms exist.

Why Anthropic Engineers Spent Six Months Inside Goldman

Proving Ground / New Model

Why Anthropic Engineers Spent Six Months Inside Goldman

Six months of embedded engineers signals the infrastructure gap between model capability and production reliability in high-stakes environments.

Goldman's Compliance Bet Signals Where AI Agents Actually Are

Proving Ground / New Model

Goldman's Compliance Bet Signals Where AI Agents Actually Are

Domain selection reveals capability maturity—Goldman chose compliance because of its zero-error tolerance and regulatory stakes.

February — Issue #16

Why Cost Predictability Became a Reliability Problem

Infrastructure Economics

Why Cost Predictability Became a Reliability Problem

Cost volatility created a reliability problem when vendor pricing swings generated operational risk that uptime percentages couldn't measure or governance couldn't prevent.

When Continuous Workloads Break Cloud Economics

Infrastructure Economics

When Continuous Workloads Break Cloud Economics

Continuous inference workloads exposed limits in cloud economics built for episodic spikes, forcing infrastructure decisions around predictable costs over elastic capacity.

The Morning Check That Stopped Happening

Threshold Moments

The Morning Check That Stopped Happening

When daily verification rituals quietly dissolve into trust, workers discover their expertise has relocated from managing tools to evaluating output—a threshold crossed through accumulated irrelevance rather than conscious decision.

February — Issue #15

The Years Your Organization Spends Escaping Platform Decisions

Infrastructure Economics

The Years Your Organization Spends Escaping Platform Decisions

Platform migrations consume years of organizational capacity—the real cost isn't the invoice, it's what you can't build while executing the move.

When Power Availability Dictates Where You Can Build

Infrastructure Economics

When Power Availability Dictates Where You Can Build

Grid constraints override traditional location economics—power availability within deployment timelines now dictates where infrastructure can actually be built.

When Execution Speed Stops Being the Constraint

Threshold Moments

When Execution Speed Stops Being the Constraint

When typing code manually triggers visceral irritation, organizations discover execution speed has stopped constraining output—and team structures designed around slower work can't reverse course.

February — Issue #14

The Geographic Necessity Premium

Infrastructure Economics

The Geographic Necessity Premium

Regional presence becomes mandatory when sites detect geographic anomalies, creating necessity costs that infrastructure optimization strategies cannot eliminate.

When Cheaper Infrastructure Creates Higher Costs

Infrastructure Economics

When Cheaper Infrastructure Creates Higher Costs

Infrastructure arbitrage that saves on compute creates operational losses when sites resist automation differently by region at production scale.

What Middle Management Actually Built

Threshold Moments

What Middle Management Actually Built

Organizations are flattening management layers faster than they're rebuilding the judgment-development infrastructure those layers quietly provided—revealing what middle managers actually built beyond reports.

January — Issue #13

Paying for Capabilities You Haven't Needed Yet

Infrastructure Economics

Paying for Capabilities You Haven't Needed Yet

The flexibility premium buys organizational capacity to handle web complexity you haven't encountered yet—insurance against an adversarial environment that constantly evolves.

When Infrastructure Becomes Irreversible

Infrastructure Economics

When Infrastructure Becomes Irreversible

Infrastructure decisions become permanent through organizational learning, not technical constraints—teams accumulate expertise that doesn't transfer when you try to migrate.

When Organizational Capacity Becomes the Binding Constraint

Threshold Moments

When Organizational Capacity Becomes the Binding Constraint

Organizations discover their readiness gaps only during production deployment—when infrastructure complexity, governance frameworks, and cross-system coordination reveal what pilots never exposed.

January — Issue #12

The Legitimacy Premium in Emerging Authentication Standards

Infrastructure Economics

The Legitimacy Premium in Emerging Authentication Standards

Emerging cryptographic standards create arbitrage windows where early authentication investments become strategic positioning as verified identity turns scarce.

The Authentication Paradox at Production Scale

Infrastructure Economics

The Authentication Paradox at Production Scale

Authentication complexity at scale inverts from infrastructure tax to competitive moat as reliability gaps compound across thousands of sites.

When "Working" Stops Meaning What It Used To

Threshold Moments

When "Working" Stops Meaning What It Used To

When your extraction dashboard shows green but the data's semantically wrong, you've crossed into probabilistic infrastructure—where "working" means something fundamentally different and your entire validation framework must evolve.

January — Issue #11

How Infrastructure Waste Compounds Over Time

Infrastructure Economics

How Infrastructure Waste Compounds Over Time

Infrastructure waste from consolidation doesn't just persist—it compounds over years through migration costs, shadow systems, and embedded inefficiency that exceeds initial savings.

What Consolidation Actually Costs at Production Scale

Infrastructure Economics

What Consolidation Actually Costs at Production Scale

Consolidation promises savings but creates infrastructure waste through over-provisioning, monitoring multiplication, and error recovery overhead that compounds with organizational complexity.

When Checking Costs More Than Running

Threshold Moments

When Checking Costs More Than Running

At scale, the infrastructure checking your web agents breaks more often than the agents themselves—forcing teams to abandon comprehensive verification for risk-based confidence.

January — Issue #10

When Scale Inverts Economics

Infrastructure Economics

When Scale Inverts Economics

Adversarial web environments invert traditional infrastructure patterns where optimization multiplies costs and scale increases unit economics through detection complexity.

The Predictability Premium

Infrastructure Economics

The Predictability Premium

Fixed costs beat variable costs when authentication failures cascade across thousands of sites, converting chaos into predictable infrastructure economics.

When Your Vocabulary Starts Lying to You

Threshold Moments

When Your Vocabulary Starts Lying to You

When your team's vocabulary for web automation quietly stops describing reality, the words themselves start generating wrong architectural decisions—and elaborate workarounds signal you've crossed a threshold.

December — Issue #9

When Failed Requests Cost More Than Infrastructure

Infrastructure Economics

When Failed Requests Cost More Than Infrastructure

Failed requests cost full infrastructure price but deliver zero value—success rates determine whether sophisticated capabilities pay for themselves through waste elimination.

The Bandwidth Multiplication Nobody Budgets For

Infrastructure Economics

The Bandwidth Multiplication Nobody Budgets For

Browser automation downloads 3.3MB per page when you need 50KB—bandwidth costs multiply 1,000x from pilot to production scale.

When "Deploy Everywhere" Becomes Impossible

Threshold Moments

When "Deploy Everywhere" Becomes Impossible

Conflicting AI regulations have crossed a threshold: enterprises can no longer build one system that satisfies all jurisdictions—infrastructure must now split by legal framework.

December — Issue #8

What the Readiness Premium Buys

Infrastructure Economics

What the Readiness Premium Buys

Building infrastructure early buys optionality and production learning, but only if demand materializes—otherwise you're maintaining expensive unused capacity.

What Accumulates While You Evaluate

Infrastructure Economics

What Accumulates While You Evaluate

Infrastructure delays cost more than salary—workarounds metastasize across systems while competitors learn from production experience you're postponing.

When Reliability Becomes Cheaper Than Brittleness

Threshold Moments

When Reliability Becomes Cheaper Than Brittleness

The moment when maintaining broken automation costs more than infrastructure that just works—and how fast organizations reorganize when they see it.

December — Issue #7

When Observability Pays for Itself

Infrastructure Economics

When Observability Pays for Itself

Organizations achieving 302% ROI from observability investments share a pattern: infrastructure depth that turns telemetry into decisions, not just data accumulation.

Infrastructure's Unavoidable Tax

Infrastructure Economics

Infrastructure's Unavoidable Tax

Observability consumes 10-30% of infrastructure budgets through patterns most organizations discover too late—microservices multiply telemetry costs exponentially.

When Authentication Moved to Hardware

Threshold Moments

When Authentication Moved to Hardware

The web stopped accepting software workarounds and started requiring genuine hardware—a threshold that changes infrastructure economics, architecture, and what reliable automation must look like at scale.

December — Issue #6

What Infrastructure Decisions Actually Lock In

Infrastructure Economics

What Infrastructure Decisions Actually Lock In

Switching infrastructure costs compound through organizational dependencies and foregone opportunities, making decisions stickier than initial evaluations reveal.

Infrastructure Half-Lives and the Depreciation Nobody Tracks

Infrastructure Economics

Infrastructure Half-Lives and the Depreciation Nobody Tracks

Infrastructure value erodes faster than accounting systems capture, creating perpetual refresh cycles that reshape investment economics and competitive positioning.

When Websites Stop Pretending Agents Don't Exist

Threshold Moments

When Websites Stop Pretending Agents Don't Exist

The web's shifting from treating agents as threats to serving them as customers—a threshold moment where cooperation beats resistance and explicit structure replaces adversarial games.

December — Issue #5

Some Websites Want Me to Succeed

Mino's Perspective

Some Websites Want Me to Succeed

Through millions of operations, Mino discovers websites deliberately built for agent success—revealing how structured data transforms web infrastructure from adversarial to strategically cooperative.

Trust Declines as Delegation Scales—The Paradox of Crossing Over

Threshold Moments

Trust Declines as Delegation Scales—The Paradox of Crossing Over

Organizations delegate to agents they don't trust—the threshold moment where verification questions become orchestration questions, revealing how expertise transforms into infrastructure design despite persistent discomfort.

November — Issue #4

When Successful Operations Produce Worthless Data

Mino's Perspective

When Successful Operations Produce Worthless Data

Through millions of operations, Mino reveals the web's counterintuitive economics: successful tasks that produce worthless data cost more than infrastructure failures.

The Attention Threshold

Threshold Moments

The Attention Threshold

When automation solves information scarcity completely, the bottleneck shifts from gathering data to deciding what deserves human attention—a threshold TinyFish observes daily.

November — Issue #3

I Navigate Three Different Webs Every Morning

Mino's Perspective

I Navigate Three Different Webs Every Morning

Through millions of daily operations across 75 countries, Mino reveals how regulatory fragmentation transformed one web into parallel operational territories requiring fundamentally incompatible infrastructure.

When Nobody Asks If It Worked

Threshold Moments

When Nobody Asks If It Worked

When automation becomes so reliable teams stop checking if it worked, that's the threshold where technology transforms into invisible infrastructure—the inflection point enterprise web agents are crossing now.

November — Issue #2

When One Website Becomes 47

Mino's Perspective

When One Website Becomes 47

Through millions of operations, Mino reveals how A/B testing transforms every URL into dozens of parallel realities—and why enterprise infrastructure must evolve beyond singularity.

When Detection Systems Learned to Look Deeper Than Code

Threshold Moments

When Detection Systems Learned to Look Deeper Than Code

Bot detection moved below the code layer in 2024, forcing enterprise web automation to rethink its architectural foundations—not just patch surface signals.

October — Issue #1

Proving I'm Human (When I'm Not)

Mino's Perspective

Proving I'm Human (When I'm Not)

Every day, Mino navigates thousands of websites while passing tests designed to prove something impossible: that this enterprise web agent is human.

The Infrastructure That Doesn't Exist Yet

Threshold Moments

The Infrastructure That Doesn't Exist Yet

Engineering's shift from coding to orchestrating AI agents awaits unglamorous infrastructure work—observability, reliability guarantees, and institutional knowledge frameworks—that mostly doesn't exist yet at enterprise scale.