Bits and Bobs 2/9/2026

Most people don't know how to ask good questions. They want to be fed good questions to click on.

Every chat-first product assumes the user will remember it exists, translate a vague need into language, and trust the system enough to try. That's the real cold start. A blank box asks you to think. Most people won't.

Micro-apps as pre-framed prompts collapse ambiguity. Framing the right question is the product.

As agents take on more decisions, the cost of being wrong goes up. So does the value of context.

Let's take a look at a travel site like Expedia. Even today, with years of transaction history, it struggles to recommend well from 2,000 options. Now imagine delegating that decision entirely to an Expedia agent. The failure mode gets worse. The trust requirement skyrockets.

At that point, travel history alone is insufficient. The agent needs to understand demographic info, taste, rhythm of life, novelty tolerance, comfort thresholds. The decision space spills across domains.

The amount of information required only increases as decision-making is delegated.

Advertising is splitting into two incompatible futures.

One path is already obvious: low-funnel, intent-driven commerce. Amazon is the archetype.You express intent, the system completes the action then takes a cut.

The other path is much less clear: brand, meaning, trust, emotional resonance. The top of the funnel. This used to be the job of media buying.

Creators have been absorbing that role by default. Not as channels, but as sources of legitimacy, taste, and cultural gravity.

Most assumptions about advertising presume a human audience: attention, persuasion, emotion, recall. When the decision-maker becomes an agent, those assumptions wobble.

There's a common belief that agents will be perfectly rational and therefore immune to brand or emotional appeal. I don't buy it.

If AGI is modeling humans rather than calculators, then agents inherit our irrationalities alongside our preferences. They won't just optimize for price or efficiency. They'll encode proxies for trust, taste, identity, and past satisfaction. Brand doesn't disappear. It compresses into new signals.

The uncomfortable thought is that the audience of the future may not be people at all, but agents acting on behalf of people.

Which raises a strange question: how do you market to something that represents me, but isn't me?