Don't build tools for AI agents
Don't build tools for AI agentsLots of people are making the case that we should stop building software for human users and start building it for AI agents. For instance, my AI agents now use Datadog way more than I use it myself, purely by virtue of them moving much more quickly and running in parallel. But I think most attempts to build “X for AI agents” are going to fail.
- ▪Don't build tools for AI agentsLots of people are making the case that we should stop building software for human users and start building it for AI agents.
- ▪For instance, my AI agents now use Datadog way more than I use it myself, purely by virtue of them moving much more quickly and running in parallel.
- ▪But I think most attempts to build “X for AI agents” are going to fail.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 5,291 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Seangoedecke |
| Canonical URL | https://www.seangoedecke.com/dont-build-tools-for-ai-agents/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:48:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-17T09:53:42.644Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-17T09:53:42.644Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | lGcN2MHKZkxC · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Don't build tools for AI agentsLots of people are making the case that we should stop building software for human users and start building it for AI agents. This kind of makes sense. For instance, my AI agents now use Datadog way more than I use it myself, purely by virtue of them moving much more quickly and running in parallel. But I think most attempts to build “X for AI agents” are going to fail. Here are three reasons why: First, tools that are good for AI agents are also good for humans. If you took a popular software product — say, Jira — and tried to redesign it for AI agents, you would end up with something very similar to Jira. Agents use a computer in the same way human engineers do, by entering text and making API calls.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Seangoedecke.
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