Don't put agents in your app — put your app in an agent

The big idea from Daniel B. is this: stop trying to shoehorn LLM agents into traditional software and start building the other way around. Agents are the interface now; apps are just tools for them to grab.

The old pattern is a web app with a chatbot bolted on. You add a sidebar, a prompt box, a few API calls. The user sits in the browser, clicks around, and hopes the agent figures out what to do. It's a bad match. The agent is only as good as the context it can reach, and a sidebar is a narrow lane.

The better pattern is the other way: an agent that has access to a set of tools — APIs, databases, file stores, payment flows — and the user talks to it in natural language. The agent calls the tools. The user never touches the UI. This is how things like Cursor and Bolt work today. They're not apps with AI. They're agents that happen to have a visual editor.

The practical takeaway is simple: if you're building something new in 2025, start with the agent and the tooling. Don't start with the dashboard and bolt on a chatbot. The agent is the product. The UI is an afterthought.

This is why a lot of old SaaS is about to feel clunky. The interfaces people actually want are text-based — a prompt, a result, maybe a confirmation. The fancy dashboards are legacy thinking. The people who win will be the ones whose agents can reach far enough to do the work without forcing the user to click through ten screens.

Why this matters for us: the tools that will actually serve our communities — la migra app, the bodega inventory system, the cousin's side business — won't be web apps with chatbots. They'll be agents that can call APIs and do the work, and we should start building them that way instead of wasting time on dashboards nobody uses.