Two months in, and 2026 is already shaping up to be the year of agents. The surge kicked off with Claude Code, which hit critical mass over the holidays before spawning a lot of lobster-themed software (long story). That culminated with OpenClaw, an open-source agent creation and management system, which has inspired thousands to begin building their own agent workforces, not to mention buying so many Mac Minis that Apple has put them on backorder.
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Key Takeaways
- AI agents are creating a workplace divide between builders and inheritors.
- Tools like OpenClaw lower the bar but builder instincts still determine value.
- Without in-house agent capacity, your workflows get defined by vendors.
It’s still early to put a number on the actual productivity gains from this movement, but the push to agents is undeniable. It’s also very exclusive. For all the talk of, “the only coding language you need to know is English,” there are technical barriers to joining this wave. You don’t necessarily need to know how to code in order to use OpenClaw, but it helps considerably.
To get non-coders get over those barriers, AI companies are shipping “training wheels” for agents, products that abstract away the challenging bits. Anthropic released Claude Cowork—Claude Code for the rest of us (which was notably built with Claude Code). More recently, Perplexity launched Computer, its “general-purpose digital worker” that users can prompt in natural language and watch it go to work.
It sounds magical in the way every good demo does: frictionless, conversational, inevitable. If you squint, you can picture a near future where knowledge work—and especially editorial work—shifts from dashboards to dialogue. Instead of pulling levers on various software menus and dashboards, you’ll just talk to agents. They’ll handle the hard stuff, and if they run into barriers, you’ll just ask another agent to build the solution.
Agents get real
Back in reality, it’s messier. Even if you use one of the no-code systems like Claude Cowork, creating tools and workflows still involves breaking down processes, finding API keys, navigating permissions, and iterating continually. And the “for non-coders” promise often comes with a footnote the size of a brick. When I used Claude Cowork for the first time, the app gave me instructions that included using the Terminal on my Mac—a program that most people have no idea exists. And if you don’t, you probably shouldn’t mess with it.
Of course, for builders, none of this even qualifies as a barrier. A builder isn’t the same thing as a coder, but they do have characteristics that most workers don’t: they want to understand the process beneath their tasks, and treat that process as modifiable and programmable. They also treat failure as feedback—not just tolerable, but sometimes even fun. They thrive in uncertainty.
Most workers, unsurprisingly, don’t default to that mindset. We’ve trained a generation of office workers to use software with clear boundaries and reusable templates. If there’s an issue, they call IT. Any feature request gets filtered and, if you’re lucky, put on a roadmap that pushes it out 6-12 months.
That means the “builder mentality” isn’t just rare—it’s the opposite of how most offices have taught people to operate. In January, New York Times tech writer Kevin Roose pointed to a growing chasm between those fully in the AI bubble, who are building multi-agent teams to help them get work done, and those who aren’t, most of which have never even built a basic assistant like a Custom GPT or Gemini Gem. As someone who trains editorial teams on how to use AI, I can confirm this gap exists and is indeed massive.
So yes, the hype is loud, but the adoption is tiny. For all the hype you might see on X, the percentage of workers who have actually adopted agentic tools is extremely small. But the people who do adopt them can still shape what everyone else ends up doing. The catch is that agents, at least as they exist today, are hard to deploy safely inside organizations. They need access to files, email, calendars, internal systems, sometimes the ability to take actions automatically. That’s not a tooling problem. That’s a permissions problem, and it makes security teams nervous for good reason.
You don’t need a sci-fi scenario to see why this makes people sweat. A recent example involved an OpenClaw agent that appeared to run amok in a Meta engineer’s inbox, taking destructive actions despite attempts to stop it. Stories like that may be edge cases, but they point to a reality: delegating software access to agents can amplify ordinary mistakes into high-impact mistakes.
The permissions wall
Until security, governance, and fail-safes improve, most organizations will move slowly on general-purpose agents. That won’t stop builders, even inside those same organizations, from experimenting anyway. They’ll just do it on their own time or elsewhere. This “capability chasm” between builders and users will eventually force solutions, and the systems those builders create will determine the workflows of the future.
If you’re not a builder, that’s a rough spot. Becoming a builder, though easier than ever from a technical standpoint, means a shift in mindset that many simply aren’t up for. The alternative is to sit passively, wait for agentic systems to filter down to you, and hope you don’t get laid off in the meantime.
There’s a third way, though, and it doesn’t require you to ship code. You don’t have to be a builder to understand how agentic workflows are changing your job. For journalists, that means identifying the parts of your work where human attention and judgment is paramount: the filtering of facts, the interviews, the writing (or maybe not), the cultivating of source and audience trust. From there, you can help define what should never be delegated, and what can be automated without harming standards. You can also push your organization—constructively—to adopt agents in bounded, defensible ways that match newsroom reality.
In other words, you don’t have to build agents to matter in an agent-driven workplace. But you do have to understand the systems being built around you, because soon enough, your job will be defined by defaults someone else designed. Most professionals will not build agents. But everyone will eventually work inside the systems builders create.
A version of this column originally appeared in Fast Company.
