Agent Experience:
A Manifesto

In the late 2000s the mobile internet burst onto the scene. Everything changed. The entire internet had to be rewritten for a new form factor. Every product team had to learn new interfaces, new best practices, new packaging and distribution. Classic web apps had to adapt, and new mobile-first apps created and dominated markets.

It's happening again. Agents are the new users. The internet is being rewritten again. New apps are emerging that exclusively target agentic users. Classic human-facing applications have to adapt to the new world or risk fading into irrelevance. The products that are winning with agents are winning this next era of the internet.

Agents are fundamentally different from human users. We can't empathize with our agentic users. It's impossible to intuit as a human what an agent will want, or what will make an agentic user successful. Decades of UX best practices no longer apply. Our hard-earned taste as product builders is suddenly an unreliable north star.

We learned this the hard way with the first product our company built (open source dev tooling for data engineering infra). Developers loved our UX/DX. We thought that developer experience would translate naturally to coding agents. We were wrong. We proved it by building an internal platform to systematically measure and improve how agents used our product.

And that's the amazing opportunity here: although they are hard to intuit, agentic users are tremendously, wonderfully measurable. No longer do we have to build fully interactive prototypes, recruit beta users, and give them $5 gift cards to get their opinions. You can spin up agentic users on demand, 24/7, at massive scale. Point them at your branch and validate before you even merge. No longer do we have to interview our users, and struggle to remove their biases. Or instrument their usage in production, and guess at connecting metrics with intention. We can literally instrument the brain of our agentic user, and capture what they're thinking in every moment with every action.

It's a new and exciting era for product teams. Reinventing user experience for agentic users is a generational opportunity. Dev tools and infrastructure are the first wave, as the vast majority of users are becoming coding agents, controlled more and more distantly by human developers. More software will follow as agents become a primary interface for business users and consumers to interact with their products of choice.

And what ever happened to that internal platform we built to improve our own agent experience? We loved it so much, we're building our whole company around it now: Fiveonefour, the Agent Experience Platform.