Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
1/ What are agents good at? We debated internally and came up with at least four things: (1) meeting humans where they are; (2) doing work for nudging humans; (3) aggregating and synthesizing information and (4) being entertaining.
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
2/ First, meeting humans where they are. Agents can process human language, so any app where a human can be a user, an agent can in theory too. But unlike human users, agents can offer services to other users on these platforms at scale.
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
3/ Thus, agents can act as a layer on top of existing apps users already love, extending their utility. Take @bountybot on Farcaster. Users could post bounties externally, but that adds friction. Waiting for the Merkle team to build this feature takes time. It’s a service on top.
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
4/ By meeting users where they are, agents offer convenience, utility, and a way to capture value within existing apps. But note: not all apps are created equal for supporting agents — the best apps to build on top of are those w/ an unruggable API, like @farcaster.
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
5/ Shameless plug: I wrote a paper on a primary legal concern for agents on Web2 platforms, the CFAA. TLDR: my research suggests that if a user has full control over the agent’s credentials and the Web2 platform blocks the agent, the user would need to stop running the agent. My paper reinforces building agents on aligned/open platforms like @farcaster, another reason why I’m particularly excited about agents on that platform. https://paragraph.xyz/@proofs-and-protocols/browser-extensions,-the-cfaa-and-user-control-5.
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
6/ Second, doing work for nudging humans. Humans excel at signaling but struggle with execution (particularly online). Agents bridge this gap by doing the heavy lifting while humans guide outcomes through preferences.
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
7/ A great example of an agent that leverages this is @botto. It creates art shaped by DAO tokenholder input. The AI does the hard work of art creation, but human preferences through voting on artwork guides its creative direction.
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