The Human Sense of Agency

Our last differentiating skill

Max

There are some people who have a passion or calling in life, people who, if they don’t follow this passion, will be ruined. I am not one of those people, but my brother is. If Max isn’t creating music, he’s not happy. He failed out of one school, got suspended from another, tried college for a few weeks and quit. A traditional route to success was never in the cards for him, yet I believe he is better positioned for success than any of us in 2026.

When Max called me and told me he’d been coding 5+ hours per day, I didn’t believe him (this activity would make him pull his hair out). Well, he’s not really coding, but prompting. Max, who has never written a single line of code in his life, has been generating thousands of lines of C++ every day to make something he’s passionate about: audio plugins.

This is not the first audio plugin Max released, but it marks a new development. Vibe coding is the next iteration of his process, one which has 100xed his productivity by removing the need to communicate with an external developer. And it’s not just the coding. He uses Midjourney and several other generative AI platforms to create content and markets that content on Instagram/TikTok. Max is taking advantage of tools available to everyone but used by so few to build a workflow that would, 5 years ago, require thousands of dollars and deep subject matter expertise, a workflow that now generates him a few thousand MRR.

I believe the reason for Max’s inevitable success in life is not his intelligence or even his musical ability—I know many brilliant musicians who go nowhere—but the fact that he is a high agency individual, a do-er that will use the now unlimited resources at his fingertips to accomplish spectacular things.

A Shift

Physical strength was, for most of human history, the best predictor of survival and success, but as technology progressed over the past thousand or so years, it’s lost it’s mojo, and intelligence has become far more important (the industrial revolution was the nail in the coffin). In the 21st century, most well-paying corporate jobs require some degree of complex cognitive thought. Especially in technical fields, such as software engineering where I work, intelligence is everything.

However, the shift that made physical strength obsolete in favor of intelligence is happening again, and much faster. This time, intelligence is becoming obsolete, but in favor of… what?

You’ve already read dozens of articles and tweets about AI progress, so I will not bore you with more, but now that intelligence is more or less commoditized—you have a subject matter genius at your finger tips for $20/mo—what is the skill that will differentiate those who succeed and those who do not? I think it is agency, the capacity for humans to act independently, to exercise their free will and impose that will upon the world.

Agency has always been important, but now it is overpowered. Previously, agency was capped by ability. If you had an idea and the gusto to pursue it, that did not necessarily mean you could make it happen. If, for example, in 2019, Max wanted to build these plugins, he’d need deep C++ expertise, content creators, and potential legal council, things which would cost him much capital and time. Now, none of these barriers really exist, and agency is far more powerful a quality because the hard limits of ability are removed.

The Tech Industry

As a software engineer living in San Francisco, I am seeing this hurt some people and help others. The archetype most hurt is the quiet genius. This person is still valuable, but far less so. Their cognitive ability, once scarce and differentiable, can now be bought and sold in the form of tokens. These types of technical workers, who rely on their intelligence but seldom take the wheel in the workplace, are going to have a hard time going forward.

On the other hand, there is another archetype that is thriving. If you haven’t heard of Roy Lee, he is a young founder of a company called Cluely. Roy and his friends have captured virality and leveraged AI to propel themselves to extreme success in a way nobody has seen before (Child’s Play is a great article on the phenomenon). There is a class of young founders emerging who do not have much industry experience nor deep expertise in any field, but are raising funding and getting customers at an astounding rate because they no longer need this to push out an impressive MVP. As for whether their businesses are sustainable or will crash and burn, I don’t know, but what is happening certainly wasn’t possible 10 years ago.

This does worry me a bit, because in 2026 we live in a world that rewards rapid progress rather than introspection. When agency is uncapped, we value the people who ask “can we do this” rather than “should we do this”. Mark Andreesen, founder of the most prominent venture fund, even brags how he practices “zero introspection”. We’re seeing this play out across the country, with unregulated prediction markets, AI “companions”, and hierarchical surveillance technology as chief examples. When intelligence is commoditized in a free market capitalist society, we punish the thoughtful people guiding technology responsibly and reward whatever can produce a Series A.

This is not to say there aren’t thoughtful, high-agency, passionate individuals who have just received a skill buff and are going to make the world a better place—there are—rather, I am noting my concern about the number of reckless high-agency people whose trigger-happiness is now uncapped and will likely shape our future in mostly negative ways.

So What

And so we have two archetypes: one who will become frustrated at declining value of the cognitive skills upon which they’ve built their career, and one who will execute on any idea no matter how harmful, in the name of technological progress and capital. I think it’s important that our leaders do not fall into either category. They’ll have high agency and exercise it, but with caution, pausing to examine their decisions and making the correct decisions where it counts. They know their agency is powerful.

While my brother is obviously not gunning to be one of such leaders of a corporation, he is someone who I think will use these tools thoughtfully and shape music in meaningful ways. Whether it be publishing his own music, creating and selling useful production tools, or something I cannot fathom, I think he will go far in the age of AI. Out of everyone I know, Max, with his passion, agency, and raw talent, is the horse I’d bet on going forward.