This week, developers got agent orchestration. Enterprises got agent platforms. Consumers got nothing.
The pattern is familiar.
The Hierarchy
OpenAI launched Codex App - a desktop environment for running multiple coding agents in parallel. Claude Agent Teams lets developers coordinate sessions across frontend, backend, and database work. Both are remarkable. Both assume you think in terminals.
Then came Frontier - OpenAI's enterprise platform for deploying AI agents at scale. HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Uber. The Fortune 500 got their agent infrastructure.
And consumers? They got Siri. The same Siri that's been promising to get better for a decade.
Why It's Always This Order
The logic is clean. Developers build the ecosystem - they create the agents, integrations, and tooling that make platforms valuable. Enterprises pay the bills - they sign the contracts that fund the next round of research. Consumers come last because they're expensive to acquire and slow to monetize.
This is how platforms grow. It makes financial sense.
But it also means 1.5 billion knowledge workers are invisible to the roadmap.
The consultant who spends 50 hours on research projects. The executive drowning in 200 daily emails. The analyst synthesizing quarterly reports. The creator drafting across platforms. The founder doing everything at once.
They're not developers. They're not enterprises with IT departments. They're people who need agents to work - right now, on their actual jobs - and the labs aren't building for them.
The Interface Gap
We've seen this pattern before. Mainframes could compute. Minicomputers could process. The capability existed long before ordinary people could use it.
The gap was never technical. It was interface.
Specialists had their tools — command lines, programming languages, technical manuals. If you could learn the incantations, the power was yours. Everyone else watched from outside.
The Macintosh changed that. Not by making a better computer for specialists, but by making a computer for everyone else. The mouse. The desktop metaphor. The idea that ordinary people could direct a machine without becoming programmers first.
The technology had been ready for years. The interface finally caught up.
The Interface Gap
Agent orchestration exists today. It's powerful. It requires:
- Managing parallel terminal sessions
- Understanding tmux
- Reasoning about token costs
- Resolving file conflicts manually
- Structuring tasks for "disjoint execution"
If you're a software engineer, this is Tuesday. You've never been more productive.
If you're a marketing director, this is incomprehensible. You just want your competitor analysis done.
If you're a researcher, you don't care about tmux. You want 50 papers synthesized into something coherent.
If you're an executive, you're not going to learn terminal commands. You want your inbox triaged and your briefings prepared.
The developer tools are extraordinary. They're also useless to 98% of the workforce.
What "For Everyone" Requires
This isn't about dumbing things down. It's about building a different product entirely.
Orchestration that's invisible. Users shouldn't manage agent coordination. They should describe what they need. The system handles which agents to spawn, how to delegate, when to verify.
Distribution that's one-click. Not "clone this repo and configure your environment." Install an agent like you install an app. Updates happen automatically. It just works.
Interface that's generative. Not chat. Not terminals. Agents that render their own UI based on the task. Direct actions - approve, edit, schedule - without re-prompting.
Verification that's built-in. Multi-agent systems where specialists check each other's work. Errors caught before they reach the user. Trust by design, not by hope.
The developer stack exists. The enterprise platform exists. The consumer operating system doesn't.
The 1.5 Billion
There are 30 million software developers in the world.
There are 1.5 billion knowledge workers.
The developers got their tools this week. The enterprises got their platform. The vast majority - the consultants, analysts, executives, researchers, creators, founders - got nothing.
They won't learn tmux. They shouldn't have to.
They won't deploy agent pipelines. That's not their job.
They won't reason about token economics. They have actual work to do.
The intelligence revolution belongs to them too. Not eventually. Not after the developers and enterprises have been served. Now.