Whoosh! That really was a week in tech. On Super Bowl weekend here in Silicon Valley, Keith Teare and I unpack an extraordinary seven days that may have broken the software business for good. Both Anthropic and OpenAI launched "agent swarms" — multi-agent systems that don't just assist with tasks but replace custom-built software entirely. Even Keith retired his own software tools this week because he acknowledged that the agents were better. And, of course, the market responded dramatically: traditional software companies like Adobe, Salesforce, Workday, and PayPal collapsed in what some are calling a trillion-dollar selloff. Even Microsoft and Amazon might be declining into standard utilities. Google is betting the house (or, at least, $185 billion of its search profits) on Gemini dominance. Elon Musk merged SpaceX and xAI to rocket data centers into space. And somewhere in all this madness, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman found time for a playground spat over Super Bowl ads. Agents ate software. And the wacky AI race not only has new leaders but even a new track. Whoosh, indeed.
