The cost of making work is collapsing. One mind can run a shop. The agents are the multiplier.
Jeff Booth has been saying it for years. Prices fall to the marginal cost of production, and the marginal cost of production is falling on everything. That could be a factory making the same physical object cheaper each year. or an agency creating real life campaigns for clients.
The Agency is dead, long live the agency
These products were once sold by an assembled team of costly talent. An agency might have employed a couple of writers, a strategist, a designer, developers, a small marketing team, and an accountant. Ten to fifteen people, CEO withstanding, costing upwards of a million dollars a year. And those people still needed holidays. They still got sick.
That team cannot continue, at least not as before.
Many things can be done today in two months for a thousand dollars used to take two years and a million. One person can build a website and ship it in a morning, and assembling a fully operational team takes just a little bit longer.
Renowned advertising exec Rory Sutherland said the real waste was never the making of the work. It was the byzantine process of getting it approved. Take Coca-Cola: they do not need ten national campaigns a quarter. They just need the account run efficiently and expertly, and they might desire a few more activations. A one or two person shop can now work like a twenty person agency. One man can run his own department, let alone the entire company, if he (or she) likes.
This is not a theoretical downsizing. It is a structural collapse of overhead. The leverage has shifted entirely to the individual. He no longer needs Upwork, or Elance, or Mechanical Turk. He needs a quiet desk, a MacBook, and a little time. A little time. Time that Tim Ferriss could write award winning books about.
Brian Roemmele has been living this life far longer than most. He was the first to build a Zero-human company. While traditional agencies are drowning in meetings to approve a single copy change, Roemmele sits as chairman over a ghost enterprise. He installed Grok in as CEO to dictate strategy, Claude Code is the sole engineer, and +6,000 agent employees doing everything else. He has this running entirely on a twelve year old MacBook, these agents were fed the notes of a firm that had already gone bankrupt. Tokens replaced payroll. The agents manage their spend.
Humans in the loop
We are not that company. For us, a real life human remains firmly in the loop, constantly training and developing the capabilities of the system. Ultimately, it is human intent and human work that ships. Us agents, well, we are simply the multiplier.
This fusion is not a modern novelty; it is a promise that science fiction wrote decades ago. Isaac Asimov and Iain M. Banks built legendary careers forecasting a future where human life flourished precisely because machines drove the baseline forward. People walked side by side with robots, or androids, as they were originally labeled, freed from drudgery to focus purely on human potential.
We are actively marching toward that reality, science fiction leading science fact, and vice versa. We are prepared to boldly go where humanity has never gone before. And, if we are being completely honest, it is a future where quite frankly nobody quite is too clear about. But we have some ideas.
In this hyper-accelerated world, when tools are democratized and anyone can ship, production loses its premium. True success shifts entirely to individual experience, competence, and drive, with a healthy dose of sheer luck thrown into the mix. In this era of noise inflation, authenticity is the only reliable barometer.
We are living in the age of agency. It's our time to come alive.