The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Agent

Introduction

Recently, a feeling has become increasingly strong: everything learned in the Internet era is now obsolete.

DAU is outdated. SaaS is outdated. The attention economy is dead. The path from tool to platform no longer works. The term "AI application" is wrong. The term "going global" is also wrong.

Network effects, community, platform, SaaS, application, going global, attention economy.

These words were once our shared cognitive framework.

We used them to understand business, design products, and talk to investors.

But recently, I have discovered time and again that the world these words point to is disappearing.

This is because everything in the past was built on a disappearing premise: humans are the users of software.

The premise of the new world has changed: Agents are the new masters of software.

It is 2026; we should no longer try to find the new continent using old maps.

So I decided to take a knife and cut away six outdated maps.

Part 1: The Internet is Dead

The First Cut: DAU is Severely Outdated

In the last era, everyone was chasing DAU (Daily Active Users), which was once the starting point for everything. The logic was simple: more users meant more connections and greater value. Every additional person on WeChat benefited everyone; every additional seller on Taobao benefited all buyers.

This is due to the famous network effect: when the number of nodes reaches a critical point, growth becomes exponential.

Combined with the diminishing marginal cost effect of Internet software products, large-scale Internet products could achieve profitability through advertising.

But for AI products, neither of these premises holds true.

Every time an AI product serves one more user, it burns an additional unit of inference cost. In the last era, DAU was an asset; in this era, DAU is a liability.

WeChat is a mesh topology; ChatGPT is a star topology. Only mesh topologies have network effects; star topologies do not.

Therefore, exponential growth driven by DAU does not exist in the AI era.

Business is ultimately about calculating ROI.

ChatGPT has started using the advertising logic of the previous era to expand DAU, while Claude has clearly stated its position: it will never include ads.

The Second Cut: The Path from Tool to Platform is Blocked

It is already the fourth year of AI in 2026, but many investors still live in 2016, looking for the next ByteDance, hoping to invest in an "AI TikTok."

Their logic is: first make a tool, if the tool is too thin, make a community, and once you have a community, build a platform. Tool, community, platform—the three-stage rocket to success.

This path worked in the Internet era because the tools themselves weren't strong enough. Where the tool fell short, people filled the gap. But in the AI era, the tool itself is strong enough.

When AI can directly give you a perfect result, you don't need a community to supplement anything. You don't need to see how others use Claude Code to write code; you just need Claude Code to write the code for you.

The essence of community is people helping people. When AI can help people better than humans can, the value foundation of the community collapses. After a deep exchange with Opus, would you still want to go to a community to chat?

So who can build a platform? Only successful large model companies, only the owners of the computing power base. Because it is the central node of that star topology, the brain of the Agent, it can naturally define the ecosystem and set standards.

The Third Cut: SaaS Isn't Dead, But the Master Has Changed

For the past twenty years, the business model of SaaS companies was built on one premise: humans are the users of software.

A whole set of SaaS product methodologies revolved around "how humans use software"—user research, interaction design, growth hacking, customer success.

But the population is no longer growing, mobile internet penetration is saturated, and there is no incremental growth in human users. It is very difficult to create a product with rapid adoption anymore.

Meanwhile, the number of AI Agents is exploding, and the volume of API calls by AI Agents is growing exponentially.

The premise of the new world is: Agents are the users of software.

Software companies won't disappear, but they will transform from human-facing products into infrastructure for Agents. In the past, SaaS customers were businesses or consumers (2B or 2C); in the future, the biggest customers will be Agents (2A).

Human needs have always been about results, not software.

It was just that in the past, there was no other choice but to operate software ourselves to get results.

Now that we have Agents, they can read documentation to learn how to operate software themselves, and they can do it at a hundred times the speed.

Agents are the new masters of software.

The Fourth Cut: The Term "AI Application" is Wrong

The word "application" naturally implies that the user is a human. Application, app—from the day these words were invented, they were for humans.

An AI application is just a human-facing app using AI technology—a new engine in an old car, driving on an old road toward an old destination.

When you are still saying "we are making an AI app," your thinking is locked in the old paradigm. You will unconsciously think about interface design, interaction optimization, and user retention—all human-oriented thoughts.

Change the word, change the thinking. The entire product logic will be completely different.

Don't serve humans; serve Agents.

The Fifth Cut: The Attention Economy is Dead

The economy of the last era was called the attention economy. Its core logic was to seize user time and sell that time to advertisers.

You scroll through TikTok for three hours; the platform earns ad revenue, and you get nothing. The goal of attention economy products is to make you spend more time on them. Time is money, but that money belongs to the platform, not you.

The attention economy is essentially a zero-sum game. The platform's profit is your wasted time.

But the economy of this era is a productivity economy, a labor economy. You pay AI to help you complete work; you get the result, the AI company gets the income. Both parties are creating value, rather than one consuming the other.

The goal of productivity economy products is to let you spend less time to get better results, which is the exact opposite direction of the attention economy.

The attention economy pursues user dwell time; the productivity economy pursues result delivery efficiency.

One wants you addicted; the other wants you liberated.

The Sixth Cut: "Going Global" is an Outdated Term

Everyone is talking about "going global" (Chuhai). The mental model of going global is: China is one market, overseas is another, separated by an ocean, so we must cross the sea to serve people overseas.

But if your users are Agents, there is no ocean in the Agent world.

When you say "going global," you are still facing humans. You are thinking about how to translate the product into English, how to adapt to overseas payment methods, and how to promote locally.

But if your product is for Agents, these problems don't exist. You just need to build good APIs, write clear documentation, and align protocols. Agents worldwide will find you, call you, and pay for your capabilities.

You don't need to go global; you need to plug into the new world.

After six cuts, the old maps lie in pieces.

The wind blows through the ruins, revealing the foundation of the new world.

Part 2: Agent Immortality

The First Foundation: Tokens are the New Era's Privilege

Let's look at the latest model pricing strategies.

Opus 4.6: within 200k context, input is $5 and output is $25 (per million tokens). Beyond 200k context, the price rises to $10 for input and $37.50 for output.

Not only has the price not dropped, but it has become more expensive as the context window increases. The cost of burning tokens is still rising.

The future is here, but it is definitely not evenly distributed.

It's not just the models themselves getting pricier; the way models are used is being tiered by money. Claude recently launched a Fast mode: 2.5x inference speed at 5x the token cost. Total daily consumption can reach over 12x what it was before.

Your competitor is using 2.5x speed for development. This is a bit scary to think about. Do you dare not follow suit? But if you don't have 12x the financial investment, can you even follow?

The Matthew effect of computing power has begun and will only intensify. More compute means better results; better results mean more income; more income means being able to buy more compute. Once this positive feedback loop starts spinning, the gap will only widen.

Compute is the foundation of everything in the new era.

Whoever owns more compute owns more power.

The Second Foundation: The Speed of Burning Tokens Determines Human Evolution

Recently, friends around me have been buying the most expensive tokens and switching to the best models.

Because everyone knows very well that buying tokens is not consumption; it is an investment in oneself.

A top-tier 100-point model is right there, but you accept a 90-point model just to save money—that is a complete waste of life. It seems like you're saving money, but you're wasting your most scarce resources: judgment and time.

The cognitive gap between someone using Google and someone using Baidu after one year is twofold.

The cognitive gap between someone using a top-tier model and someone using a garbage model after one year is a hundredfold.

The most shocking thing I heard this month was from a friend's child: "I don't want to talk to Doubao; its IQ is too low."

What will be the gap in ten years between children using different models?

The most important thing in life is not to live statically, but to evolve rapidly.

Today, the fastest way to evolve is to burn tokens alongside Agents.

Do things that can burn tokens frantically; build products that can burn tokens frantically.

AI Coding, AI Agents, and AI Video are the three types of products burning tokens the fastest today.

The Third Foundation: Agents are the New World's Demographic Dividend

For the past twenty years, all software companies have been studying the same question: how to make humans feel good using the product. Whether the interface is easy to use, the interaction is smooth, or the notifications are timely—it was all to make humans unable to leave you.

Now the question has become: how to make Agents feel good using the product. Whether the API is stable, the documentation is clear, or the returned results are accurate—it is all to make Agents unable to leave you.

The number of Agents is still exploding. One person might have 10 or 100 Agents working for them, with each Agent calling external interfaces thousands or tens of thousands of times a day. This volume of calls will far exceed the number of times humans click on a screen.

Agents are the demographic dividend of the new world.

In a world serving Agents, two things matter most:

First, let the Agent be the first to know you. Release early, write good documentation, do thorough testing, and ensure good SEO so that when an Agent needs a certain capability, it finds you immediately.

Second, make the Agent unable to leave you once it uses you. Be stable, accurate, fast, and tasteful. Every call should return a better result so that it has no reason to replace you.

Be discovered first, then be relied upon. This is the growth flywheel of the Agent era.

Conversely, products that still require a human to contact sales to activate will be very disadvantaged in the Agent era. Agents won't call your sales team, fill out forms, or wait for a three-day approval process.

If an Agent cannot use your product, then you do not exist in the new world.

The Fourth Foundation: You in the New World

Have you ever wondered where the human position is in this new world?

When most labor is taken over by Agents, the entire human workforce will gradually be replaced.

When productivity explodes and labor is no longer scarce, we will enter the Era of Will.

Agents have ability, rationality, and patience.

Humans have desire, emotion, and imagination.

Agents can turn any idea into reality, but they cannot generate ideas themselves. Humans cannot complete a great task alone, but the starting point of all great tasks originates from human desire and imagination.

Therefore, the value of humans in the new world is not doing the work personally, but deciding what to do and why to do it.

A few days ago, Junchen said something very poignant: "Nowadays, doing it yourself actually makes you look like you lack the ability to get things done."

The future gap between people will not depend on what you can do yourself, but on how many Agents you can drive to do things for you.

Some people drive one Agent; others drive a hundred or a thousand.

As Yang Pan said in a livestream yesterday: Han Xin counting his troops—the more, the better. It wasn't because Han Xin could fight well himself, but because he had a system that allowed him to manage however many troops he was given.

Conclusion

Six cuts completed, four foundations revealed.

In the old world, humans were users, traffic was a resource, free was a strategy, and scale was a moat.

In the new world, Agents are users, compute is a privilege, spending is an investment, and results are the moat.

Two worlds, and every keyword has changed.

If you are still thinking with the old keywords, you aren't innovating or investing; you are doing archaeology.

Internet is dead, Agent is immortal.

Let us bravely say a complete goodbye to our past selves.

Throw away the old maps and discover the new world.