Bullying is not innovation.
Personal agents are the future.
Published Nov 4, 2025 · Around 2 minutes to read
Amazon wants to stop agentic browsers (like Comet) from shopping on their platform. Why? Because Amazon wants to serve more ads and sponsored results. And having agents shop for you takes control (and $$$) away from Amazon.
Perplexity has some good responses to Amazon's threat here: Perplexity's response
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But there are two other things that stood out to me from the article:
Software is no longer just a tool, it’s also labor. Agents are labor. They will replicate the work of humans. Like it or not, this is already a reality. The hope is that they only take over low-value work that is optimized for machines anyway. Which brings me to the second point.
You can’t truly own your agent unless you own the system prompt. I use a ton of AI tools daily: Dia, ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, Visual Electric, Midjourney… the list goes on. I split my work between all of them, because I don’t actually want these tools to KNOW me. Why? Because I can’t edit the system prompt.
The system prompt is hidden.
When you ask ChatGPT a question, the style in which it responds is preprogrammed via the system prompt. Something like “You are a helpful assistant, answer the user’s question in a friendly manner.” You can influence this prompt, but it won’t be completely personalized.
I agree with Perplexity’s vision that user agents should be private, personal, and powerful. But my agent can’t be fully private, personal, and powerful unless I can control the system prompt. Plus I don’t want to get locked-in to SaaS tools.
Which is why I’m building my own personal agents. More on this soon.
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