Agency Is The Last Frontier

Introduction

The “it’s so over” crowd could not be more wrong about the impact AI will have on the world. Competition is going to show up in a very narrow way (by a very small group of people), rather than in a very broad way (the proclaimed “everyone is going to build with AI”).

For the first time ever since the birth of humanity, the tools to literally build anything are available to anyone. You could be a teenager fresh out of high-school, and you literally have the same tools to build at the same velocity as a second-time founder sponsored by Sequoia. A self-taught developer that has never seen the insides of a corporate building can build games that compete with Blizzard.

I’ve been doing this quantitative trading thing professionally for awhile, and I am in awe everyday at how much the agents have encroached on my painstakingly earned professional knowledge. My interns can now, via well-articulated prompts, tap into a knowledge base that would have previously been accessible only from spending years, if not decades on the field.

In many domains, the barriers to entry have essentially vanished.

And yet.

The distribution of outcomes will be getting more unequal, not less.

The world-builders that are building and shipping their ideas are pulling away from the median at an accelerating rate. It’s like the expansion of the universe - soon there will be nothing but space between the best and the rest.

This seems like a paradox. If opportunity is more equally distributed than ever, why are results more concentrated than ever?

The answer is simple: opportunity has been democratized, but agency has not.

The Great Decoupling

For most of human history, what you could accomplish was constrained by what you could access. The right school. The right city. The right connections. The right capital.

These weren’t just advantages. They were prerequisites. Without them, your ceiling was fixed before you started. If you were born into a warrior family, you were not going to lead the life of a noble no matter how hard you tried.

Today, the constraint isn’t access. It’s something far more uncomfortable to talk about, because you can’t blame it on anyone else.

The constraint is you. Specifically: whether you actually do things, or whether you just think about doing things.

I know people who have spent three years “planning to learn to code.” They have access to every tutorial ever created, AI assistants that can explain any concept, communities that will answer any question. They have more learning resources than probably an entire university had access to in 2000.

Yet, their portfolio remains barren. Eons will go by before they have written a single function.

I also know a (then) high-schooler, [REDACTED: I’ll let him comment if he wants to] who just decided to start building a market maker and has made good money from it. X is full of high agency people like him, I personally know of at least a few. They didn’t have a plan. They just decided to start and stick with it until something worked. When he started, there was barely ChatGPT, he made it work then, and can you imagine what he can do now?!

Yet, look at the extremely vast pool of people who have more resources, more years of experience who want to “explore market making”. Same tools. Same access. Same theoretical opportunity. Where are they? What have they tried?

Completely different outcomes. Why?

The Polymaths That Never Were

Here’s something that should give you a clue: the internet has been widely available for over twenty-five years.

Twenty-five years of instant access to essentially all human knowledge. Every lecture from the best professors. Every book ever written. Every technique, every framework, every hard-won insight from every field. All of it, free, searchable, available at 3am in your underwear.

The theoretical prediction was obvious. We should all be polymaths by now. The average person should have working knowledge of history, science, philosophy, economics, art, coding, medicine, law. Not expertise in everything, but competence in most things. The barriers to learning collapsed. Surely the learning would follow.

It didn’t.

The average person in 2025 is not measurably more knowledgeable than the average person in 2000. They have access to more knowledge but that did not translate to having more knowledge.

This is the spread between what is theoretically possible and what actually happens. Between the world that could exist given the tools available and the world that does exist given how people actually behave.

This spread has always existed. But the tools keep getting better, which means the spread keeps getting wider. And the people who figure out how to close it, how to actually use what’s available, they’re the ones inheriting the future.

If you are high agency, this is no time for fear, it’s time for unbridled optimism!

The Fear Merchants Are Wrong

You’ve seen the takes. “If you’re not vibe coding at midnight, you’ll be unemployable in two years.” “Learn AI or become permanent underclass.” “The window is closing and you’re already too late.”

This is mostly nonsense. The fear merchants have completely misread the competitive landscape.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine you could give every person on Earth a button. Press it, get a million dollars. No strings, no tricks, just press it.

Do you honestly believe that everyone would press it?

Some would be suspicious. Some would forget. Some would mean to get around to it. Some would press it halfway and then get distracted. Some would spend weeks researching the optimal button-pressing strategy and never actually press. Some would look at the button, think “that’s interesting,” and go back to scrolling Twitter. Some will talk themselves that having a million dollars would be bad.

The fear that you need to grind relentlessly just to keep up assumes you’re competing against everyone. You’re not. You’re competing against the small fraction of people who actually do things, and that fraction is much smaller than you think. Most people opt themselves out. They find friction where there is none. They wait for permission that was never required. They prepare endlessly for a moment that never arrives because they never let it arrive.

The bar for “doing things” is laughably low precisely because so few people clear it.

I’ve watched people agonize for months over which AI tool to learn first, as if choosing wrong would be fatal, as if they couldn’t just... try one and then try another. I’ve seen people spend more time researching productivity systems than being productive. The friction isn’t in the tools. The friction is in their heads.

So no, you don’t need to develop existential dread to avoid the underclass. You just need to be someone who presses buttons. That’s a lower bar than the fear merchants want you to believe, and also, somehow, a bar that most people still won’t clear.

The Phenomenal Opportunity (No, Really)

The ability to bring ideas to life has never been cheaper, faster, or more accessible. This is not hyperbole. This is measurable fact.

Things that required teams now require individuals. Things that required months now require days. Things that required expertise now require willingness.

A decade ago, if you wanted to build a web application, you needed to understand servers, databases, frontend frameworks, deployment pipelines, security, scaling. Today, the programming language of choice is English. The distance between “idea” and “working prototype” has collapsed by an order of magnitude.

This is a genuinely remarkable moment. And yet, the internet was a remarkable opportunity, still, most people have never built anything on it. Remarkable opportunity means nothing without someone to seize it.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Not everyone needs to be a builder. But if you want to build, if you feel that itch, if you have ideas that keep you up at night, the tools have never been more ready for you.

The question is whether you’re ready for them.

Closing the Gap

High-agency people are not smarter, there are plenty of extremely intelligent people that have done nothing with their lives.

What they do have however, is the ability to see the spread between what they think is possible and what actually is and NOT be paralyzed. For the vast majority of humans, if the distance seems vast, intimidating, unclear; then they go into fear/contingency mode, where they will research, plan, prepare and wait until they feel ready. Often, they will NEVER feel ready ENOUGH.

High-agency people see the same spread and just... start walking. They don’t wait to feel ready. They don’t need the whole path to be visible. They take one step, see what happens, adjust, take another step.

This sounds like generic motivational advice, and I apologize for that. But I’ve watched it play out too many times to dismiss it. The people who are building the future, right now, today, aren’t the ones with the best plans. They’re the ones who started before they were ready, learned by doing, and iterated faster than everyone else.

You could be one of those, but only if you actually try.

Agency Is The Last Frontier

Every other advantage has been democratized or is being democratized. Access to capital? Crowdfunding, micro-VCs, bootstrap-friendly business models. Access to distribution? Social media, app stores, direct-to-consumer everything. Access to knowledge? The entire internet. Access to tools? AI assistants, no-code platforms, open-source everything.

What’s left? What can’t be downloaded, copied, or distributed?

The willingness to act.

The willingness to be embarrassed by your first attempt. The willingness to ship before it’s perfect. The willingness to ignore the voice that says “who are you to do this?” The willingness to close the gap between knowing and doing.

This is the last frontier because it’s the one thing that’s genuinely scarce. Everything else is abundant now. Information is abundant. Tools are abundant. Even capital, relatively speaking, is abundant.

But agency, real agency, the kind that converts potential into actual, that’s rare. That’s always been rare. And in a world where everything else is commoditized, it’s the only remaining edge.

Be A Doer, An Inventor

There is nothing stopping you.

Not the economy. Not AI. Not your lack of credentials. Not your location. Not your background. Not the “gatekeepers”. Not the “competition”, because most people aren’t actually competing. They’re just watching.

The only thing stopping you is the decision to start.

But I’m also not talking to some abstract “everyone.” I’m talking to you. The person reading this right now. The person with enough resources to have internet access and enough time to read an essay about agency.

For you? Almost certainly, you can do it, unless you’ve decided to be your own worst enemy.

The thing about this moment, the genuinely remarkable thing, is that the tools have never been more ready to help you build something meaningful, learn something valuable, create something that matters.

You just have to start.