[ { "id": "agent-desktops-replace-ides-for-some-developers", "data": { "prediction": "By 2027-10-01, at least 50% of professional software developers in a credible public developer survey will report that an agent desktop app, agent workbench, or open source equivalent is their primary coding environment rather than a traditional IDE.", "made": "2026-05-10T00:00:00.000Z", "resolves": "2027-10-01T00:00:00.000Z", "confidence": 0.65, "resolution": "pending", "resolved_on": null, "resolution_note": null, "evidence_at_time": [ "thoughts/agent-harness-is-the-new-ide" ], "tags": [ "agents", "tools", "development" ] }, "body": "The underlying bet is that Codex, Claude Code, and their open source equivalents are becoming the place where development work is coordinated, not merely tools invoked from inside an editor. For a meaningful minority of developers, the center of gravity will move from VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, and similar IDEs to agent desktop apps or agent workbenches that hold the repository, shell, browser, tests, instructions, review loop, and task memory.\n\nFor resolution, \"primary coding environment\" should mean the environment where the developer spends the largest share of hands-on software work time, even if they still open a traditional editor for occasional direct edits. A \"credible public developer survey\" can include sources such as Stack Overflow, JetBrains, GitHub, State of JS, State of AI Engineering, or another broadly cited industry survey with a transparent sample and methodology. If no credible survey asks this question directly by the resolution date, resolve as ambiguous rather than false.\n\nThe prediction should resolve true if the threshold is met by desktop agent apps, terminal agent workbenches, local agent IDE replacements, or open source equivalents. It should resolve false if agent tools are widely used but remain mostly embedded inside traditional IDEs or terminals rather than replacing them as the working environment for at least 50% of surveyed professional developers." }, { "id": "agent-marketplaces-succeed-app-stores", "data": { "prediction": "By 2027-05-14, at least one major AI assistant or cloud platform will launch a public or partner agent marketplace/directory where users can discover, install, rent, or invoke third-party or provider-curated agents, positioning agents as the next distribution layer after apps, plugins, and GPT-style stores.", "made": "2026-05-14T00:00:00.000Z", "resolves": "2027-05-14T00:00:00.000Z", "confidence": 0.57, "resolution": "pending", "resolved_on": null, "resolution_note": null, "evidence_at_time": [ "thoughts/app-stores-will-evolve-into-agent-markets", "inputs/anthropic-claude-managed-agents", "inputs/openai-workspace-agents-chatgpt" ], "tags": [ "agents", "app-stores", "marketplaces" ] }, "body": "This prediction is narrower than \"people will make many agents.\" It requires a distribution layer that functions like an app store successor: discovery, install or invocation, ownership or publisher identity, some form of governance, and a path for recurring or metered use.\n\nThe directory can live inside ChatGPT, Claude, a cloud marketplace, an enterprise assistant, or another comparable platform. It can begin as a curated partner shelf rather than a fully open marketplace, but it should include agents that are not merely private automations built inside a single customer's workspace. Templates alone do not qualify unless they can be selected and run as maintained agents with an identifiable publisher or provider.\n\nResolve true if at least one major platform publicly offers such an agent catalog by the resolution date. Resolve false if the market remains limited to internal team directories, one-off GPTs, connector catalogs, prompt template galleries, or cloud services that expose APIs but not agent-shaped workers. Resolve ambiguous if providers announce the marketplace but do not make it available to any real customers before 2027-05-14." }, { "id": "agent-pricing-shifts-to-intelligence-units", "data": { "prediction": "By 2027-02-01, at least one major AI platform will price off-the-shelf or rentable agents using an opaque blended unit such as credits, intelligence units, or agent capacity, where the customer-facing meter combines model choice, token use, tool calls, data access, execution speed, and runtime rather than exposing tokens or wall-clock time as the primary billable unit.", "made": "2026-05-15T00:00:00.000Z", "resolves": "2027-02-01T00:00:00.000Z", "confidence": 0.7, "resolution": "pending", "resolved_on": null, "resolution_note": null, "evidence_at_time": [ "thoughts/agent-harnesses-will-move-onto-the-shelf", "inputs/anthropic-claude-managed-agents", "inputs/openai-workspace-agents-chatgpt" ], "tags": [ "agents", "pricing", "marketplaces" ] }, "body": "This is a pricing corollary of the [rentable agent harnesses prediction](/predictions/rentable-agent-harnesses-become-available). If agents become off-the-shelf work units, the platform has an incentive to hide the mechanical bill of materials behind a product-shaped meter. The user does not want to choose between token buckets, tool-call prices, database query costs, model latency tiers, frontier-model surcharges, and execution runtime before asking for work. They want to spend some amount of capability.\n\n\"Opaque blended unit\" does not require the provider to literally use the word \"intelligence.\" Credits, capacity, agent units, or another branded meter qualify if the public pricing page makes that unit the main thing a customer buys or spends, and if that unit clearly abstracts over several underlying cost drivers. A normal/fast/deep mode toggle can count as part of the blended unit if it affects the price or burn rate.\n\nResolve true if a major AI platform publicly prices preconfigured or rentable agents this way by the resolution date. Resolve false if agent pricing remains primarily transparent pass-through pricing for tokens, wall-clock execution time, individual tool calls, or fixed subscriptions without a metered agent-consumption unit. Resolve ambiguous if providers use blended internal accounting but do not expose it clearly enough for customers to understand that agent work is being charged through a combined unit." }, { "id": "art-brut-reprices-as-generative-ai-countermove", "data": { "prediction": "By 2030-12-31, Art Brut and adjacent Outsider Art will have materially repriced as an investment target, with public market commentary linking its appeal to the scarcity of uncontrolled, visibly human making in a culture saturated by high-fidelity generative AI imagery.", "made": "2026-05-15T00:00:00.000Z", "resolves": "2030-12-31T00:00:00.000Z", "confidence": 0.6, "resolution": "pending", "resolved_on": null, "resolution_note": null, "evidence_at_time": [ "inputs/art-brut-wikipedia", "inputs/art-basel-ubs-global-art-market-report-2026", "inputs/adobe-firefly-agentic-creative-control", "inputs/hiscox-ai-generated-art-collector-concerns" ], "tags": [ "art", "art-brut", "outsider-art", "generative-ai", "markets" ] }, "body": "The prediction is that Art Brut will become newly valuable because it is almost perfectly positioned against the visual mood generative AI is producing: high fidelity, high control, endless finish, and a growing sameness of commandable beauty. When polished images are abundant, the scarce thing is not beauty. It is pressure. It is an object that appears to have arrived from a private necessity rather than from a production system.\n\nIn that setting, Art Brut and adjacent Outsider Art become easier to understand as a counter-asset. They offer irregularity, compulsion, material presence, and a kind of authorship that is hard to fake without becoming theatrical. The market will not need to describe this only in anti-AI terms, but AI will be part of the weather: collectors will look for work that resists the suspicion of being procedurally optimized.\n\nThe practical implication is that someone with discretionary money sitting passively in the bank would be better served becoming literate now: learn the artists, dealers, archives, museums, condition issues, provenance traps, and auction history before the category becomes too obvious. That does not mean buying blindly. It means building taste and market memory while the thesis is still early.\n\nResolve true if, by the resolution date, Art Brut/Outsider Art shows at least three of the following signals: major art-market reports, auction houses, or wealth/collecting publications explicitly discuss the category as a growth or investment target; dedicated Art Brut/Outsider Art auctions or fair sections become more prominent at major market venues; multiple Art Brut/Outsider artists set materially higher public auction records than their 2025-2026 levels; at least one mainstream collecting guide frames Art Brut/Outsider Art as a response to AI-era questions of authenticity, human touch, or overproduction; or museums and blue-chip galleries create enough institutional attention that market commentary treats the category as newly repriced rather than merely historically interesting.\n\nResolve false if Art Brut remains a niche collecting category with no clear repricing, no broader investment narrative, and no visible connection in market discourse to AI-era saturation or authenticity. Resolve ambiguous if institutional attention rises but prices do not, if prices rise only for one or two already-canonical names, or if the category becomes fashionable culturally without becoming meaningfully investable." }, { "id": "orchestrator-worker-agent-resource-layer-by-mid-2027", "data": { "prediction": "By 2027-06-30, a recognizable agent resource layer will exist in which user-facing orchestrator agents act as human-to-agent-to-agents interfaces and delegate work to specialized remote worker agents or harnesses through A2A, an A2A-compatible protocol, or a directly comparable agent-to-agent contract.", "made": "2026-05-15T00:00:00.000Z", "resolves": "2027-06-30T00:00:00.000Z", "confidence": 0.6, "resolution": "pending", "resolved_on": null, "resolution_note": null, "evidence_at_time": [ "thoughts/agent-harnesses-will-move-onto-the-shelf", "inputs/a2a-agent2agent-protocol", "inputs/haai-human-to-agent-to-agents-interface-working-term", "inputs/anthropic-claude-managed-agents", "inputs/openai-workspace-agents-chatgpt" ], "tags": [ "agents", "protocols", "orchestration", "harnesses" ] }, "body": "The prediction is that agent systems will grow a new resource layer between the user's primary agent and the growing sea of specialist agents. The shape is a chain into a graph: human to orchestrator agent to worker agents. At the border are orchestrator agents: OpenClaw, Claude running on a user's machine, a managed ChatGPT workspace agent, Gemini or Copilot in an enterprise surface, or some similar agent that is trusted to represent a person's intent. These orchestrators become the HAAI, the human-to-agent-to-agents interface, not because they do all the work, but because they hold the relationship with the human while routing work to other agents.\n\nInside the graph is the worker layer: specialized agents and harnesses that can perform known categories of work reliably enough to be selected, invoked, monitored, and swapped. This is the same motion as the earlier off-the-shelf harness prediction, but with more attention on topology. The harness becomes a rentable capability; the orchestrator becomes the routing and accountability surface.\n\nA2A is already a foundation for this because it describes agents discovering each other's capabilities, communicating as opaque systems, exchanging task state, and delegating work without collapsing every worker into a tool call. If that style of protocol becomes normal, then specialized agents start to look less like custom integrations and more like addressable resources in a graph.\n\nResolve true if, by the resolution date, at least two major AI or cloud ecosystems publicly document or ship an agent layer where a user-facing orchestrator/client agent can discover, select, or delegate tasks to specialized remote agents through A2A, an A2A-compatible implementation, or a comparable open or documented agent-to-agent contract. A qualifying worker agent should be more than a function call or MCP tool: it should expose an agent identity or capability card, accept stateful task delegation, return progress or artifacts, and be usable without the orchestrator knowing its internal toolchain.\n\nResolve false if the market remains mostly chat assistants calling tools, bespoke internal multi-agent systems, or manually wired agent templates with no broadly recognizable delegation/resource layer. Resolve ambiguous if the pattern exists only in closed pilots, if it is visible in one ecosystem but not enough to look like a layer, or if the terminology changes while the architecture is only partly present." }, { "id": "rentable-agent-harnesses-become-available", "data": { "prediction": "By 2027-05-14, at least one major AI platform will offer rentable, preconfigured agent harnesses for specific professional task domains, priced by credits, token consumption, execution time, completed work units, or a mixture, so that a user or organization can launch a specialized task agent without building and operating the harness from scratch.", "made": "2026-05-14T00:00:00.000Z", "resolves": "2027-05-14T00:00:00.000Z", "confidence": 0.62, "resolution": "pending", "resolved_on": null, "resolution_note": null, "evidence_at_time": [ "thoughts/agent-harnesses-will-move-onto-the-shelf", "inputs/anthropic-claude-managed-agents", "inputs/openai-workspace-agents-chatgpt" ], "tags": [ "agents", "harnesses", "marketplaces" ] }, "body": "The prediction is about the productization of the harness, not merely the availability of better models or custom prompts. A qualifying offering should bundle several of the following into a reusable agent package: system instructions, tools, connectors or MCP servers, cloud execution environment, permissions, secrets handling, memory or state, evaluation or quality gates, and a task-specific workflow.\n\n\"Major AI platform\" includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Meta, or another broadly adopted AI/cloud provider with credible enterprise distribution. The offering can be first-party, partner-provided, or marketplace-listed, but it must be usable by customers as an off-the-shelf specialist rather than as a tutorial for building their own agent loop.\n\nResolve true if the platform lets customers select and run a preconfigured specialist agent for a domain such as software maintenance, CMS/frontend implementation, sales operations, finance reporting, security review, customer support, or data analysis, with metered pricing tied to usage or execution. Resolve false if agents remain mostly organization-internal custom builds, templates that still require substantial setup, or generic chat assistants without a rented harness boundary. Resolve ambiguous if the capability exists only in a private pilot with no public documentation by the resolution date." } ]