If you’re involved in any way in agentic software, LLMs or AI, and you also suffer from the deeply unfortunate habit of opening Instagram or TikTok occasionally, you’ll have encountered the collision of these two worlds.
The AI influencer.
Dear God.
I have never rolled my eyes so much in my entire life.
Actually, that’s not true. I have. But we’ll come to that.
You know the routine.
BOOM!
Some enormously excited bloke appears on your screen, accompanied by a violent zoom effect and seventeen animated captions.
“FIVE REPOS YOU MUST INSTALL BEFORE YOU WRITE ANOTHER LINE OF CODE IN CLAUDE!”
BOOM!
“CLAUDE HAS JUST KILLED EVERY MARKETING AGENCY ON EARTH!”
BOOM!
“THIS ONE SECRET CLAUDE SKILL WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER!”
And then, inevitably:
“Comment REPO below and I’ll send you the link!”
“Comment AGENT and I’ll show you how!”
“Comment POTATO and I’ll reveal the seven-step framework that will make you a millionaire by Thursday!”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
It’s the same breathless, hyperactive, paper-thin waffle, endlessly recycled by people who’ve apparently discovered that putting the word agentic in a sentence makes them a technological visionary.
I saw one this morning.
“Claude Code can now post Instagram Trial Reels!”
And I thought, seriously?
Do you genuinely believe these models are so monumentally stupid that I need a special influencer-approved repository to accomplish this?
I could, entirely hypothetically of course, have the following conversation:
“Claudey baby, I don’t trust Anthropic’s web browser. Every time I try to get it to post something on social media, it’s ‘computer says no’. It won’t do half the bloody things I ask. Build us our own browser. Call it Relay Browser. That’ll get us posting again.”
“Done, Stevie.”
“Lovely. Now spin up another agent, give it the appropriate skills and tools, and get it working on Instagram Trial Reels.”
“What’s the publishing strategy, Stevie?”
“Fuck knows. Go and ask the Media Agent.”
“Cool.”
Now, obviously, there’s engineering involved. Permissions, authentication, integration, testing. Actual work.
But that’s precisely the point.
The extraordinary thing about agentic development is that you can delegate the problem, not simply follow someone else’s little recipe for solving it.
Why are we treating immensely capable reasoning systems as though they’re helpless toddlers who need seventeen GitHub repositories and a YouTube tutorial before they’re allowed to touch a keyboard?
And don’t even get me started on the apparent religious obligation to install an MCP server for absolutely everything.
Sometimes they’re useful. Sometimes I’d rather let my agents build exactly the integration they need, with exactly the data they need, and reuse it forever.
But I digress.
Because something suddenly occurred to me this morning.
I’ve seen all this before.
Oh my God.
It’s Crypto 2.0.
The same bros. The same breathless excitement. The same insinuation that if you just follow these five simple steps, you’ll become fabulously wealthy without having the faintest idea how anything actually works.
The same people recycling each other’s content, confidently explaining technologies they understand approximately as well as my dog understands quantum mechanics.
I know this world rather well.
I was once a self-employed quantitative crypto trader. For a while, I was worth millions.
I made millions.
I lost millions.
So please don’t mistake this for the smug pronouncements of someone who thinks she’s cleverer than everyone else. I’ve demonstrated my capacity to be a spectacular fucking idiot with considerably more money at stake than an Instagram engagement metric.
But I remember the crypto influencers vividly.
Some revolutionary new token would appear. Everyone would start screaming about how it was going to transform civilisation.
And I’d go and investigate.
“Right. What does it actually do?”
“Okay. But how does it work?”
“Right. So you’ve essentially created a database pointer on a blockchain that references a file sitting in some off-chain storage?”
“Yes!”
“And that’s going to revolutionise the world?”
“YES!”
“Right. Lovely.”
Of course, crypto had the greater fool theory working beautifully in its favour. Someone could always buy your revolutionary database pointer for twice what you’d paid for it.
Until they couldn’t.
And I was quite happy taking money off idiots and educated people alike. As it turned out, I was also perfectly capable of giving it all back.
But here’s what genuinely irritates me about this new wave of AI influencers.
The underlying technology really is extraordinary.
We’re watching an enormous change in how software can be conceived, constructed and operated.
And much of the social-media conversation about it has already descended into the intellectual equivalent of a man in a rented Lamborghini shouting about passive income.
Which brings me to another question I used to ask the crypto bros, and one I’m increasingly tempted to ask their AI reincarnations.
If you’re so fucking good at making money with this technology, why is your entire business model based on selling me courses about how to make money with this technology?
Seriously.
If you’ve discovered the secret to generating millions using AI agents, why are you spending your Tuesday afternoon begging strangers to comment “MASTERCLASS” underneath an Instagram reel?
I don’t see Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund manager, jumping around on TikTok shouting, “FIVE QUANT TRADING SECRETS WALL STREET DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!”
“COMMENT QUANT AND I’LL SEND YOU MY FREE PLAYBOOK!”
He’s rather busy running a hedge fund.
Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with teaching people. Good educators are worth their weight in gold.
But when your principal achievement appears to be selling courses explaining how to achieve your principal achievement, I do begin to wonder whether we’ve stumbled into some sort of entrepreneurial perpetual-motion machine.
Perhaps the real passive income was selling everyone else the dream of passive income all along.
It’s the same circus.
The same clowns.
The same promises.
Only this time, they’ve discovered that the word token has an entirely new meaning.
God help us all.