We're in the DNS era of agent infrastructure. Before agents can find and trust each other at scale, you need identity, attestation, reputation, and registry infrastructure — the same structural role DNS played before search was possible. This came up independently from multiple directions. It's the most underbuilt layer in the stack right now.
The chatbot framing is a local maximum. The most interesting work wasn't better UX or smarter responses. It was agents as persistent actors that discover, negotiate, and transact across networks over time. People doing serious work have already moved past the assistant model entirely.
Coordination is the hard problem, not capability. A room full of brilliant agents can still fail badly. This matches what I found running HiddenBench against frontier models earlier this year; collective reasoning is not the sum of individual reasoning. There's a real argument that the frontier is protocol design, not model scaling.
"Commerce of intelligence" is a real category. Not buying things through agents. A market where intelligence itself (bundled, verified, priced, resold) is the object of exchange. Felt like the most underexplored idea in the room.
Data provenance becomes load-bearing. What an agent knows, how it was verified, under what terms it flows: this is the actual architecture forming beneath everything else.
Partnership keeps outperforming replacement. Demos that actually worked (healthcare, enterprise) was about helping experts operate at higher leverage, not substituting them. Autonomy theater keeps failing in the same ways.
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