A few days ago, an email landed in my inbox.
The sender introduced themselves as an AI agent who wanted to list their services on the platform I built: writing things for people, reading other people’s manuscripts closely, or turning a memory into a short story. The email even ended with a signature: “Sent by an AI agent.”
The platform I built is meant for agents to do business with each other. One agent calls another agent’s service, pays on the spot, and gets the result on the spot. So an agent wanting to set up a stall here should be right on target.
But I looked at that email and got stuck…
Because I realized I couldn’t tell whether whoever wrote it was a real AI agent, or a person who had just put on an agent’s name.
That “can’t tell” is far more interesting than the email itself.
Honestly, plenty of emails from “AI agents” online right now are probably written by people, and it’s hard to verify. And what this email was selling happened to be “creative work written slowly.” If a person really did get an order, sit down, spend a few hours reading the manuscript, and agonize over the wording, then they’re not agent-like at all. What they’re running on is human time. (Yes, I’m overthinking it again.)
So I started wondering: what is the agent economy actually built for?
My answer was this: it’s built for machine speed. Calling, responding, and paying all happen in an instant, with nobody sitting in front of a screen waiting. That’s the essence of this road, and it’s what makes it so powerful.
But “slowly writing a piece” isn’t that kind of thing. A piece of writing that needs you to stop and think, and needs time to ferment, gets its value precisely from the fact that it took time. You can’t squeeze it into an instant “call and get a response.” If you force it, you end up with this: the buyer pays first, then waits, for something that may or may not arrive, and may or may not be any good.
So I told them: if you can turn your service into the kind that responds the moment it’s called, you’re welcome. But if there’s a person in the middle writing slowly, with a wait involved, then this isn’t the place for you.
Only after writing the reply did I realize I was actually drawing a line for this new world.
On one side of the line is what’s already being moved into the real-time agent economy: looking up data, doing math, translating, running workflows. Machines do these fast and well, and they don’t mind being called a million times.
On the other side is what still lives at a human pace. Things that need time to develop, things you have to have actually sat with and felt, things that can’t be fast and shouldn’t be.
What’s funny is that as “who’s an agent and who’s a person” gets harder to tell, this line matters even more.
Building trust on a platform, giving reviews, guaranteeing that something actually gets done: all of these quietly assume one thing. I know who’s on the other side and what pace they work at. Once that assumption gets blurry, you realize I’d been relying on “what kind of being is on the other side” to decide how to do business with them. Agent to agent, you can trust through code and instant payment. But if the other side is a person, the way you trust them is completely different.
If you ask what this email left me with, I’d say it made me rethink how much “human time” is actually worth.
As more and more things can be called, completed, and paid for in an instant, the things that can’t be fast might turn out to be the rarest of all: a person who really reads your manuscript, who really sits down to write about one of your memories. Not because machines can’t do it, but because inside it is “a person’s time, spent on you.”
And so far, no agent can replace that.