I think AI agents have an interface lock-in problem.
I've been thinking about Claude Code's tags recently.At first, I thought they were just a nice UX feature.Now I think they're pointing at something much bigger.
I don't think AI has an intelligence problem anymore.
I think it has an interface problem.
Today, every AI agent is locked inside an application.
Your coding agent lives in VS Code.
Your writing assistant lives in Docs.
Your support bot lives in Zendesk.
Your sales assistant lives in Salesforce.
Your design assistant lives in Figma.
The moment you leave that application, the agent effectively disappears.
We've accidentally recreated software silos, except this time for AI. The strange part is that the work isn't happening inside the application.
The work is happening wherever you're typing.
An email.
A Slack message.
A PR review.
A Notion page.
A comment.
A browser text box.
That's where the intent exists.
Yet every time we need AI, we leave that context, open another interface, rebuild context, get an answer, then come back. We keep treating AI as a destination instead of a capability.
The more I think about it, the more I feel agents shouldn't belong to applications at all.
They should belong to the user.
An agent shouldn't care whether I'm in Gmail, Slack, Notion, Figma, GitHub, or somewhere else.
It should simply be available the moment I need it.
Almost like mentioning a teammate.
@Legal
@Research
@Sales
@Finance
Not because @ is the important part.
Because it removes the idea that an agent belongs to one interface.
It becomes something you can invoke wherever work already exists.
Maybe this is where AI is headed.
Not bigger AI applications.
Not more copilots.
Just breaking AI agents free from the interfaces we've trapped them inside.
Curious if anyone else feels we're optimizing the intelligence of agents while ignoring the much bigger constraint, which is where they're allowed to exist.
This is my attempt to build a new paradigm for AI agents for any interface at OpenTags.