Anatomy of an agent

15 August 2026

Every new iteration of your favorite product is now a chat interface with a bunch of MCP integrations and a set of skills. Skills tell the LLM how to use the MCP effectively. These are what I call tools.

Creating a chat interface has become the easiest way of making your product agent native; it forces you to add what is needed for agents to use it. In turn, it's now easier than ever to connect a few tools and add a chat UI on top. To me, this means that products with pay-as-you-go pricing should be better placed to benefit from the new AI wave of innovation.

Products not creating tools fast enough become blockers for AI-native users, so I've created Douze. A Chrome extension + relayer tandem that allows you to convert any site into an MCP + skills combo you can use in any AI of your choice. Here's a demo on how it works:

Douze listens to network requests and catalogues what you do in a site. It creates a list of endpoints and descriptions on what they do and exposes them through a relay to hosted AI platforms. GitHub repo

While the gap between the big model providers and the applications built on top becomes smaller, the gap between what coders can do and what non-technical people can do keeps widening.

For example, a coder wants to create a new outreach tool: create a new folder, add some tools for profile enrichment like Apollo, connect an outreach tool like Instantly and a CRM like Attio. Voila, you have a sales agent tool better than 90% of what's out there.

The elephant in the room is whether specialized tools will be able to outcompete these home-baked alternatives. Most importantly, if homegrown alternatives to popular software will be sticky enough. Following the Dropbox history line, they should.

Providing 80% of the value of most tools out there with a layer on top of strict pay-per-use at 20% of the price should outcompete in an AI-competitive world. Providing provable, verifiable work at specific problems will also be valuable in a world where tokens stop being subsidized, e.g. data aggregation that allows for the agent to skip most research.