Long-form essays on the
emerging discipline

Trust in agentic systems is not a feeling. It is an architecture - with layers, load-bearing elements, and failure modes that can be designed.

Banking services negotiated while you sleep. Insurance that adjusts without a form. The stratum of agentic capability that creates value without any visible interface.

Every agentic system begins with an act of delegation. How that delegation is designed determines whether the system serves or subverts its principal.

In the Japanese art of kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired with gold. The fractures are not hidden - they are illuminated.

By 2028, autonomous agents will be making purchasing decisions, negotiating contracts, and managing financial relationships without human intervention.

When you delegate authority to an autonomous agent, you give consent that extends across time in ways fundamentally different from any previous form of digital permission.

In agentic systems, the interface is not the experience - it is the interruption. The A2UI is the narrowest possible opening between human attention and autonomous action.

In the agentic age, interfaces are not designed once and deployed - they are assembled dynamically by agents from modular components, tailored to context, task, and user.

Every system will fail. The measure of an agentic system is not how rarely it fails, but how gracefully it recovers. Trust is a muscle that strengthens through repair.

An operational envelope defines the precise boundaries within which an agent is authorised to act. Too narrow, and the agent is useless. Too wide, and it becomes dangerous.

The relationship between a human and an autonomous agent is not static. It follows a developmental arc - from cautious introduction through deepening trust to mature partnership.

The more you observe an autonomous agent, the less autonomous it becomes. The less you observe it, the less you trust it. Resolving this paradox is the central design challenge.

Beneath every agentic experience lies an intelligence layer - the substrate of reasoning, learning, and adaptation that makes autonomous action possible.

Like technical debt, trust debt accumulates silently. Each small violation - a missed expectation, an unexplained decision - compounds until the relationship collapses.

What happens when an agent's ethical constraints conflict with its user's instructions? Autonomous integrity is the design principle that governs these moments.

Trust is not a constant. It fluctuates with time, context, and experience. Designing for temporal trust means designing for a relationship that is always in motion.

Delegation scope defines what an agent may do, under what conditions, for how long, and with what resources. It is the grammar through which humans express authority.

An interrupt that comes too often trains humans to dismiss it. An interrupt that comes too rarely allows consequential errors to accumulate. Getting this right is a design problem of the first order.

The shift from instructing to specifying outcomes is the fundamental interaction paradigm of agentic systems. Users must learn to express intent, not procedure.