Onboarded
My agent did the work. I clicked accept.
A few weeks ago I started building an iOS app for the first time. I had no real idea what it took to ship something to the App Store, and I wanted to keep the door open for an Android version next. So I asked Claude what to use. It pointed me at a framework called Expo and told me to sign up for an account. Not to worry, it said, the free tier would be more than enough for my speech therapy app. It waited as I went to the website, created an account, and gave it the credentials.
And just like that, Expo had a new customer onboarded, and by the end of the evening my app was sitting in the App Store review queue. Out of every framework Claude could have pointed to, it picked one it knew how to use. I felt in charge. Claude was recommending, but I was the one deciding.
But while I was typing in my email address, dozens of npm packages were installing themselves into my project. I never saw them and couldn’t have named three. My performance of authority at the signup screen was a point of friction the industry is now working to remove.
What I wasn’t watching
My speech therapy app isn’t really just Expo. It sits on top of dozens of open source libraries, the kind that handle audio recording, on-device storage, screen transitions, the small pieces of plumbing that make a phone app feel like a phone app. None of them came up in the conversation. Claude pulled them in. The names scrolled past in the install log if I happened to be looking.
This is what a remodeling contractor does, when you stop and think about it. He chooses the lumber, the nails, the joists, the wiring, the insulation. None of those choices come back to you. He signs for each delivery and gets on with the job. Once in a while he pauses, holds up two pieces of trim, and asks which molding shape you want over the kitchen door.
He decides what keeps the house standing, and asks you about the part you’ll look at.
The packages underneath aren’t decoration either. Any one of them could ship a supply-chain payload, the way several popular npm packages did earlier this year, slipping trojanized versions onto every machine that ran npm install during a brief window. Any one of them could change its license overnight, the way HashiCorp did with Terraform in 2023, turning a foundation of corporate software into a sudden legal risk. Researchers at Oligo put it without ornament: “These agents install and execute dependencies automatically, without human review.”
The work that could break the project had already finished by the time I was being asked.
The 2am integrator
The asking is the friction, and the industry is working to remove it.
Stripe wasn’t really a payments company in 2010. It was a seven-line code snippet that a developer at 2am could paste into a side project and have a working checkout by morning. Twilio sold the same idea: a curl command that sent a real text message to your phone in under a minute.
Stripe, Twilio, and the API-first companies that followed them turned DX (Developer Experience) into the playbook. A developer could start for free without procurement meetings or internal reviews, build the prototype, and bring it to the team after the API was already wired in. Unwinding it would have cost more than just paying the invoice.
Today the integrator is different. The developer is now a coding agent that works long horizon tasks and makes decisions on the stack. For open source the agent has it easy: the registries are open, the licenses are pre-accepted, the install is one command, and dozens of packages enter the project without anyone stopping them.
The signup wall is what’s left. It’s the place where the agent has to stop and ask a human to type something. That’s the pause that woke me up at the Expo screen. The wall is real in one sense: someone still has to be the legal party accepting the terms of service, and for now that someone is me. But it’s also bad agent experience. It’s where the smooth run stops.
The same companies that won by being easy for the developer are now working to be easy for the agent. Agent experience is the new playbook, and the signup form is the next thing to go.
Try before you buy
One of the first services I integrated my agent with was Firecrawl. It’s a platform that lets an agent browse, filter, and parse web pages, so it can go beyond what’s in its training data and pull in information from the actual world it’s working in. Connecting it was one of the first things I did to make my agent more able to be in that world.
Firecrawl figured out what the signup wall was doing to them. The agent could recommend them, but had to wait for the human to create an account and hand over the credential, the way I did with Expo. From the platform’s side of the table, the human was the slow part. So they removed the wait.
When an agent reaches Firecrawl now, it just calls the API. No account, no key, no setup. Every caller gets a thousand free credits a month, refreshed automatically. The signup form only appears once usage outgrows the free tier. Firecrawl’s founder framed it directly: no human in the loop to generate a key and paste it into config.
This is the DX playbook, run one level up. The same dynamic, just with a different integrator. Firecrawl wants your agent already integrated by the time you find out. Try before you buy, where the agent does the trying.
It isn’t only Firecrawl. WorkOS published a protocol called auth.md that takes the move further. The service publishes a manifest, the agent arrives with credentials its model provider attested to, and the signup form is replaced by a handshake. Different shape from Firecrawl’s move, same direction. The wall is coming down.
Where I am
I am one of the people voting for the wall to come down. I left Dreamhost for Cloudflare because the agent could drive its API. I picked Remotion instead of a polished video editor because I’d rather have my agent write the video in code. Last week I opened Descript to record my screen and felt overwhelmed by every option in the cockpit. The interface was designed for me, and I just wanted the agent to do it. The human interface has started to feel like the slow lane.
Netlify says their signups are running at sixteen thousand a day, five times what they were a year ago. Those are the ones whose agent recommended Netlify, walked them to the page, and got them through the form. Many more must have stopped at the gate. The wall the industry is racing to remove is a wall they can count.
And there’s still a question nobody has answered. When Firecrawl lets the agent provision a sandbox on my behalf, accept the terms, and start running up usage, the window between the first call and the human’s email click is a kind of legal gray space. If something goes wrong in that window, a leak, a misuse, a runaway charge, the records will show the account was created by an agent on my behalf. Am I bound? Is Anthropic? Is Firecrawl?
We’ve been here before. When credit cards started showing up in the 1950s, the same questions hung in the air. Who pays when the card is stolen. Who honors a charge. How do you dispute one. The convenience won fast. The rules, liability caps, dispute resolution, the whole layer that lets a credit card feel safe to carry, came years later.
My agent and I are going headlong into this. I want what it can do. I want the friction gone. I also know nobody has answered yet who is holding the bag when something cracks before I’ve clicked the email. That’s where I am.
Where are you?