The Age Of The Agent Builder

A new category of people is thriving in the AI era.

They aren't traditional engineers. Some of them have never written a line of code.

But they have quietly built working internal tools, small agents, automations, side projects -- real systems that other people use.

You can find these people working in marketing, revenue operations, sales and even HR and finance. They show up all across the organization. They show up on agent.ai. And there are more of them every month.

I started calling them Super High Agency Humans, then noticed the acronym was SHAH, which was my last name. (I did not plan this. Don't worry, I'm keeping my day job.) I came up with a more dignified alternative. One that doesn’t embarrass me and suggest my ego is even larger than it actually is: SHIPpers (Super High-Impact People), since shipping is what these people actually do. They ship solutions that actually solve real-world problems.

Regardless of what you call them (I’m trying on both for size), the category is real, and it has only recently become possible. So today I want to break down:

• What “agency” actually means here (and what it doesn’t)

• Why this new category of people is thriving in the AI era

• How to tell if you fit the definition already (and how to get there if you don’t)

—@dharmesh

The Two Ways to Use AI Today

People sort themselves into one of three buckets when it comes to AI:

1. The first bucket: avoids. They tried it once (3 years ago) and it didn’t work. Or, they are morally opposed to it. Or, they’re scared of it.

2. The second bucket: chats. writes emails with it, brainstorms with it, summarizes meetings with it. A real upgrade -- not knocking it. Something is better than nothing.

3. The third bucket: builds. They take the same AI, hook it to something else, connect it to some tools, automate a workflow, create an agent others can use, or maybe even turn it into an agent that runs while they sleep.

When I say a super high impact person, I am pointing at something more specific than the person who tries harder at work, reads the right newsletters, or memorizes the names of the latest AI tools.

Those people exist in every company, and most of them are wonderful colleagues. They are builder adjacent.

But for all intents and purposes, the human we are talking about is someone whose default move, when they hit a problem worth solving, is to try and build the thing. They see a slow process and automate the painful step on a Wednesday night. They see a missing tool and assemble a working version over a long lunch. They may not succeed at first — but that’s OK. They’ll wait a month. Try it a different way.

They see a workflow that should not require six humans and a Slack channel, and they wire up a small agent for the part nobody wants to do.

To put it simply, they are builders who don’t let their lack of building experience stop them from addressing a problem that’s slowing them down at work.

Why The Unlock is Happening Now

If agency has always been a trait, why is the super high agency human a category now and not ten years ago?

Building a working internal tool used to require an engineer, a few meetings about scope, and a roadmap slot that probably didn't have room for HR onboarding anyway.

What changed is not just that the models got smarter. The harness around the models became accessible.

Platforms like agent.ai, Cursor, Replit, and a dozen others now let a non-engineer describe a goal in plain English and get back something that actually works.

The bottleneck has been moving from whether we can build a thing toward whether we should bother building it at all.

My article on You^AI is another way to think about this. A determined non-engineer can now build real apps with AI, and a technical engineer can build ten times as many apps as they used to.

Either way, the category grows because the floor for what one person can ship alone in an evening has moved up.

Where Do You Fit In?

Here is the part where I turn the mirror around to point at you.

If you are reading this and silently thinking, "Yeah, that sounds like a few people on my team," that is excellent news for everyone involved. Go tell them, out loud and on purpose, before a better company recruits them away.

Super high agency humans tend to underestimate themselves badly, because what feels obvious to them is rarely obvious to anyone else.

If you are reading this and thinking “that sounds a little like me, but I have not actually built anything yet”, you are probably closer than you think. What separates you from the super high agency version of yourself is one Saturday afternoon, the one where you stop bookmarking the builder tool and finally open it.

If you happen to be managing a super high agency human at work, the most useful thing you can do is give them a bigger problem, and then get out of their way. Or ask them what they’ve tried, what they’re excited to tackle and what tools they need.

Whether you’re a certified SHIPper a super high agency human or someone aspiring to become one soon, hit reply and tell me about the last thing you built. Hearing your stories is one of my favorite parts of writing this newsletter.

—Dharmesh (@dharmesh)