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RL Rachel Lee Nabors On The InfoQ Podcast

“Personal agents are the app that kills all software for consumption. When it comes to consuming content, buying things, it will most likely come through an operating system level agent… They don't want to visit your website. They don't want to download your app. They never wanted to do those things. They just needed an answer or a thing. They needed to snap their fingers and have it done. That's all we've been building for.”

The InfoQ Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“Personal agents are the app that kills all software for consumption. When it comes to consuming content, buying things, it will most likely come through an operating system level agent… They don't want to visit your website. They don't want to download your app. They never wanted to do those things. They just needed an answer or a thing. They needed to snap their fingers and have it done. That's all we've been building for.” — Rachel Lee Nabors, The InfoQ Podcast

Rachel Lee Nabors, asked whether frameworks and apps have a future. She argued that app consumption has stalled even as releases boom, and that big platforms will fight agents for the "surface area" of ads and upsells, citing Amazon's suit against Perplexity's agentic browser.

Transcript

The InfoQ Podcast Around 29:18 into the episode
Rachel Lee Nabors

by Vibe. Love it.

Olympi Pop

…That you were part of those teams that put together probably some of the most important frameworks for building web and even local applications. How do you see it? Will the future still have frameworks, applications, web, mobile, whatever you want in the normal sense, or we'll just have meshes?

Rachel Lee Nabors

…just like a price point where someone's making a choice on where is the best place to get cheap beer, that's bad for their bottom line. They don't want that. So it will be an ugly fight, but it will ultimately be an impossible to win fight. We already see this. People, you know, using Claude to do their searches for them, just looking at the AI summaries on Google search. They don't care. They don't want to visit your website. They don't want to download your app. They never wanted to do those things. They just needed an answer or a thing. They needed to snap their fingers and have it done. That's all we've been building for. So that's what the future for that looks like. And if you are curious about like, well, how are they going to generate all the interfaces for all this information? Check out things like A2UI. This is a standard by which your API can send the AI assistant a JSON schema of what information you're going to give them. And that assistant can look at it and use its design system to make a widget on…

Olympi Pop

Yeah. So standards are important. Usually standards are brought behind companies and that put an acronym on it and then that's it.

Rachel Lee Nabors

Yeah.

Olympi Pop

Well, obviously, if a standard is not good, it's just about time for having another standard that replaces so on and so forth. So we know that. But the question is, we as consumers, what should we transform ourselves into? Because we all saw something on a dashboard that looked good, but we don't…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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