Manual Death
I've been busy setting up my new Macbook over the last couple of evenings and weekends, and I've been struck by the quality and depth of the content online.
Perhaps it's unsurprising given Apple is the world's most successful consumer products business - it makes sense, in that context, that there's plenty of people trying to monetise related content. But I also found it when Googling for how to navigate the settings on my heated clothes dryer, which is much less sexy (but to be fair probably as impactful on my quality of life).
The point is: everything is online today. Written manuals are completely pointless. The information on how to get the most out of pretty much any piece of equipment on the planet is already living out there on the open Internet, and - by extension - now within the training data of essentially every LLM out there.
The corpus of knowledge for machines to operate machines is complete and makes the potential of truly agentic software even more compelling. Not only will agents be faster and cheaper at using tools, they'll also be much more effective at getting the best out of those tools. Agents will become expert users of every piece of equipment and software they interact with. They may even uncover feature overlaps across software suites and help us to consolidate our tool stack (and spend) accordingly.
I don't think we fully appreciate the many second order effects of what agentic really means, but it doesn't feel long before we start finding out.