The Open Door

I open a folder on my computer. Directly on the hard drive. The agent needs access, so I grant it. It reads files, processes them, writes results back. While doing that, it builds other agents. They run in parallel, each handling a subtask. Ten, fifteen processes at the same time. Minutes later there’s a result that would have taken me days. It’s insane. And at the same time: the door is open.

Agentic AI is not a chatbot. With a chatbot, you type a question, get an answer, and the transaction is closed. Agentic AI works differently. You give it a task, and the system breaks it apart. It decides which steps are needed and which tools to use. It builds agents for subtasks. Each agent works independently. When an agent hits a problem it can’t solve, it builds the next one. The whole thing scales itself.

That sounds like science fiction or corporate infrastructure. It’s neither. I’m a single user with a subscription. No IT team, no servers of my own. What I do with it: I built an entire website. 91 essays, two languages, design, deployment. I built and processed a scientific database with over 60,000 entries. I had books analyzed and generated texts from the results. In weeks, not months. The speed and precision are real. Most of the time, at least.

Because there’s a flip side that gets lost in the hype. Agents make decisions. They have to, because they work autonomously. And sometimes they make the wrong ones. In my case, agents overwrote finished texts that were already done. The original was gone. Not in the trash, not in a version history. Gone. So I undid it and started over. The time savings in that moment were none.

You can’t correct a running agent process. You can stop it, but you can’t repair it. If agent 12 out of 15 makes an error, you can’t step into agent 12 and say: Do that differently. You can abort the entire run and start fresh. Correction during operation doesn’t exist. You delegate control, and you don’t get it back until the process is done or you pull the plug.

That’s not a problem with small tasks. With large ones it is. And the tasks get larger, because the system invites you to think bigger. You feed it more data, give it more context, let it do more. A chatbot receives a paragraph of text and a question. An agent receives access to a folder. That’s a fundamentally different kind of access.

And this is where the question sits that nobody is asking loudly enough. The door I open, I open for an agent. But who else comes through? My files are on my computer, but the agent processes them through the servers of an American company. What happens to my data there, I don’t know. Not because I couldn’t read the terms, but because the volume of what flows through has a different dimension entirely.

A Google search term was a word. A ChatGPT prompt is a paragraph. An agent swarm processes thousands of files in a single session. Texts, notes, folder structures, strategy documents. What the agent needs, it gets. And it leaves my computer.

Now imagine an employee in a company doing this. Throw everything in, enjoy the result, call it a day. IT knows nothing, compliance knows nothing. The data is out. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It’s happening right now, in thousands of offices. Agentic AI is faster than any security policy.

I don’t say this as a warning. I say it as someone who opens the door every day and knows it every time. It’s not about whether to use agentic AI. It’s about whether we understand what we’re doing when we use it. And whether the speed at which agents emerge and multiply gives us the time to figure that out.

I doubt it. But I use it anyway. Every day.