AI Agents Need Servers Not Computers for Hyper-Personalized Software
Agents deserve Servers, not Computers
Every agent is getting a computer (whether it's localhost or a sandbox) as part of their harness. Evals like TerminalBench even assume the presence of a computer! It's been a long time coming: a computer and a simple set of process management tools IS the universal toolset for agents[0] (in practice authentication to perform external actions is still a pain but an MCP CLI with approval flows going back to the user is ~close enough[1]).
I will not dive into the details of why localhost is inherently a single-player game and how it won't scale past a couple days of human-work-equivalent tasks for agents... These tasks are inherently cross-functional and, when you think about it, will require multiplayer steering, which has to happen in the cloud. Localhost is dead.
But what I want to posit here is that beyond computers or sandboxes, what we want to equip our agents with is not a "computer" but rather a shared machine, aka a server. A server shared with other agents and humans. The server comes with instructions for agents and humans to interact with it. Agents interact with it through bash (universal, right?) and humans can ask their agent to create a UI on the server for them to interact with the data in any way they see fit, for their company, for their team, for themselves. Humans and agents operate on a shared system (be it a project task list, a mini-ERP, a custom-made CRM). Humans can conjure the UI/UX they need at any given time or they can also just ask their agent to do the right stuff, no UI needed.
I thiiiink we're about to enter the era[2] of hyper-personalized business software. Funny how history is playing backward for agents from PC to Mainframe, not the other way around. Very funny also how Wall Street might have gotten this whole "SaaS is dead" thing right very early :o Kuddos to them (maybe this is next scale SaaS is dead also?). If you ask me (you haven't), I'm a pretty big fan here of the shared-nothing approach (everything lives in the sandbox, code, db, config, ...). The server comes loaded with a sqlite database or any other straightforward storage system that can be introspected easily and gets snapshotted as part of the sandbox directly. UIs are custom-made for every use case and can be discovered, shared, polished.
If you squint, this is Lovable turf, but I don't think they're that well positioned for the wave to come. They're inherently B2C and when one (me) tries to push their product in that direction, there's still a lot of friction. On top of that, this whole server idea is hell on earth in terms of the lethal trifecta[3] especially since users will want to share these custom-made views with people external to their team or even company. The work on authorization is deep and challenging here, which is great!
I'm super pumped to push in that direction. This is multiplayer AI at its finest \o/ Feels like a very exciting opportunity for the space. Can't wait to see how fast we rewrite the way we use software.
[0] 6m already! https://youtu.be/9OjcAYsncpw?si=N8aI2OErivcU9egM&t=374 [1] MCP vs CLI vs Code [2] Note eras in AI land last 6mo max. [3] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/