One OS per person
Open the "Settings" page on your phone. Hundreds of options tucked away in submenus, designed for an average user who doesn't exist. For forty years, software has been a mass product: the same program installed on millions of devices, and it is up to each of us to adapt to it.
Agents are breaking this logic without us noticing. Today, they write a small script for every tool they need: Hermes, for example, turns every successful task into a reusable skill. Nothing already lets you generate widgets from a single sentence, then share and remix them.
Malleable software
The next step is to merge these scripts into a single piece of software that rewrites itself on command. No more settings page: "In dark mode, keep the mic button in its daytime colour." The agent modifies its own code, appearance included. Every person ends up with a different OS.
This raises a problem the industry has never had to solve: how do you fix a bug in software that is unique in the world? The answer comes from software development. Every mutation must be a commit, tested in a sandbox, reversible and shareable. The app store then becomes a marketplace of mutations, where you pick up someone else's modification rather than a whole app.
The last interface
Once software adapts to the person and voice covers most needs, the screen becomes useless for most of the day. The last brick is hardware: a discreet open-ear earpiece, worn from morning to night, that layers the agent's voice over the surrounding soundscape. Leaks about OpenAI's first device describe exactly that: an audio object, with no screen, worn behind the ear.
One question remains that technology won't settle. In Her, released in 2013, Samantha lives in an earpiece and speaks with a perfectly human voice. The film isn't about productivity, it's about attachment. The more natural the voice, the smoother the exchange, and the blurrier the line. When the agent calls the plumber for us, should it say it is an AI?
The phone won't disappear. It will slip into the pocket to become a server, and the interface will end up in the ear.