There isn't a single moment I can point to. It's more that I keep using agents for ordinary things, and I keep landing on the same uncomfortable thought. The interface is still there. The question is how much longer it needs to be.
The agent orders the food, suggests the film, sorts the return. Sometimes it does that by driving the same screen I would have used, reading the page, filling the fields, clicking the button a human was meant to click. Other times it skips the screen entirely and talks to the service directly, over MCP or something like it, no page involved. The first way is the agent miming a person. The second is the service and the agent just talking.
That's the part I keep extrapolating from. As the direct connection spreads, the shipped screen drops out of the loop. The service exposes what it does, the agent acts on it, and nothing in that exchange was ever drawn for a person to look at. Which would be fine, except a person still wants to look. I order takeaway and I do want to see the options, the prices, the thing I'm about to confirm. So if the standing screen is gone, something has to put one in front of me. The agent does. It renders me something then and there, built for that request, in that moment, and gone after.
So the screen doesn't disappear. The app does. The standing thing with a name and an icon, the one someone designed and shipped and kept alive through version after version, meticulously A/B testing, stops being how any of this works.
And the strange part is that I don't know who designs that. Someone decides the food gets shown as a grid and not a list, that the price sits here and the photo there. Is that me, the designer, defining the pieces the agent composes from? Is it the agent, deciding in the moment from whatever the service exposes? I honestly can't tell. The work might still be mine and just move earlier, into the components and the rules. Or the composition, the part I always thought was the actual design, moves to the agent and I never see the result.
The hopeful version is that this moves me up a level. I stop drawing screens and start defining what the agent draws from. The components, the rules, the way a service describes what it offers and ranks its own options. Less layout, more logic, but still design.
Except I'm not sure I believe that when I say it. It sounds like the thing you reach for when you want the story to have somewhere hopeful to go.
Because the other thing the trajectory suggests is consolidation. If agents become the way people get things done, then whoever owns the agent owns the moment of choice. Search became the front door once. App stores became the toll gate. Each time, a layer that felt like plumbing turned out to be the most valuable position in the system, and the company sitting on it got to set the terms for everyone underneath.
So here's the prediction I actually want to make. The big AI labs don't stop at the agent. They attempt to take the whole stack. The model, the agent, the operating system it lives in, even the hardware underneath that. Top to bottom, owned by the same handful of companies. We've half seen the shape of it already. Google went from search to Android to a phone. Apple spent two decades proving what owning the silicon, the OS and the store together buys you. The AI labs are building from the ground up with that lesson baked in, and they have more reason than anyone to want every layer, because the agent is only as powerful as its access, and access is exactly what owning the stack gives you.
Once the agent lives that deep, the old boundaries stop applying. No sandbox to escape. No app store to be listed in. No platform to negotiate terms with. The agent reaches everything directly, and whoever built it sets the rules for all of it.
Which is the part that actually unsettles me. If that's where this lands, the services the rest of us build stop being things people use and become things an agent picks from. You don't design for a person anymore. You feed a system that chooses on their behalf, and then you build for the system, trying to get it to pick you.
Underneath both of these, the power one and the craft one, is the same thing I can't put down. Not that the screens go away, because they don't. That they get built fresh each time by something that isn't me, for a user who's still right there looking at them. I can't tell yet whether I'm watching my work disappear or just change hands.