First, tools that are good for AI agents are also good for humans.

AI tools are as good as the AI themselves, which is not much

As an example, let’s imagine that humanoid robots have become ubiquitous. What kind of tools would you build for them?

If we're building a robot and thinking about efficiency, we wouldn't make them humanoid, even if we want it to do a wide range of tasks, because the human form is full of limitations - just try scratching your back or looking behind you.

if you’re building a robot, you should make them humanoid so they can do a wide range of human tasks1, and that means they’ll be best suited to use human tools. The same principle applies to AI agents.

Meanwhile, if you want a robot to do something as efficiently as possible, you make it the specialized tool. Say you make an android and make it use a loom. Wow, it can move its arms like a human! Now, if only there was some way of making that sort of work faster and more efficient!! Oh, look, specialized automation.

Second, being in the training data is a huge advantage for existing tools. Suppose your new tool for AI agents is 20% better for them than the equivalent piece of software for humans.

Now that sounds like corporate bullshit. Our software is 20% better... By which metric? 20% less code? 20% more performant? 20% less resource intensive? 20% more features? Let's assume it's simply "20% better"

If the benefit of the agent already knowing the human software is greater than 20%, they shouldn’t use your new tool

This makes no sense for 2 reasons, the first being that the software being "greater" or "better" does not automatically mean it's more efficient, the second being that the existence of "better" software doesn't mean you should ditch "worse" software for it.

This is why I’m always suspicious of plans to develop a new programming language for AI agents.

That would be a stupid idea mainly because humans use programming languages because it is much easier to grasp than looking at a given CPU's Assembly instructions. The "ideal" ai agent would be programming in pure assembly, avoiding compilers or scripted languages, but since there's almost no training data for that, we don't see any agent doing that and likely won't for a good while. That's the "20% better" software/tool that neither humans nor AI are using