I really enjoyed Andrej Karpathy’s keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco. As the former Director of AI at Tesla, Andrej is both smart and articulate. His talk got me thinking—again—about agentic modes of work, especially the idea of the agentic slider, which I’ll unpack here.
We are shifting—slowly but surely—from the left column to the right. And contrary to popular opinion, I agree with Andrej: this isn’t the year of agents. It’s the decade of agents. It’s going to take longer than most people think, because people are involved.
The Agentic Slider
Let’s use Andrej’s Iron Man analogy. Right now, we’re just starting to suit up. We’re augmented—with a few nifty gadgets at our disposal—but still firmly in control. We’re the human boss.
As the suit gets smarter and more capable, the dynamic shifts. We move from being the driver to the passenger. The system becomes orchestrated. We’re still in the loop, but now we’re more contributor than controller.
Eventually, the Iron Man suit flies on its own—automated. That’s the far end of the agentic slider. But we’re not there yet. Today, we’ve got employees walking corporate corridors trying to right-size themselves into Iron Man suits.
This is the agentic slider in action: from augmented → orchestrated → automated.
But here’s the catch: this shift doesn’t happen in neat, sequential steps. It’s not a smooth handover of control. Why? Because humans still need to verify everything agents generate. And that makes us the bottleneck.
It’s a necessary bottleneck—for now. Which is why we need better GUIs. Interfaces that help us audit AI. Tools that keep agents on a tight leash. Otherwise, it’s garbage in… and even more garbage out.
Moving the agentic slider to the right requires maturity—earned through real-world experience. That maturity comes from:
- Building GUIs that reduce human bottlenecks,
- Shortening the distance between generated and verified,
- And crafting agent experiences that are AI-ready and optimized for high-automation environments.
We’re not flying yet. But the suits are getting smarter. It’s time to design the systems—technical and human—that will get us off the ground.
