AI Agents Are Becoming Employees Faster Than We Expected

We trade stories about AI agents acting like employees, from browser automation that pulls contacts and writes tailored outreach to the uncomfortable reality of getting flagged for “inauthentic” behavior. We also dig into the security and adoption gap behind the shift toward a post-UI world where critical thinking becomes the real interface.

• UI-less tools versus UI-based wrappers for mainstream adoption 
• LinkedIn automation getting detected after switching Playwright-style behavior to faster flows 
• Why platforms flag agents based on timing patterns and unrealistic throughput 
• Using agents to find executives, gather contact data, and tailor cybersecurity outreach 
• How “computer use” works with browser agents and local machine access 
• The risks of granting full access permissions and safer isolation with a dedicated machine 
• The psychology of the black box and why minimal UI makes people comfortable 
• Critical thinking as a dividing line in the AI-powered workforce 

Josh

Jenna

Jack 

Randy 

Transcript

I-Less Future And LinkedIn Risk

SPEAKER_04 0:00

People that have critical thinking skills will be able to dock that to your point.

SPEAKER_05 0:05

And create something for the people who have no critical thinking skills.

SPEAKER_04 0:09

That will still always want a UI. So there's gonna be an a UI list world and a UI-based world, and it's And that's how you get banned from LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

That's how you get banned from LinkedIn.

n Unexpected Guest Drop-In

SPEAKER_05 0:21

Yeah. Please tell me you're not gonna be one of these idiots who's downloading open claw to your machine and exposing all of your data for all the world to see. Well. This guy's been staring at me for the past 60 seconds as I was as I was wrapping up, since we're wrapping up.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

Oh, hello! Mr. Cardin. You missed him last week, Joe.

SPEAKER_05 0:47

They were matching. Oh my god, this is an official freaky.

SPEAKER_03 0:50

That's freaky, right? It's horrifying. He came in last week too. We we found him. What? Oh wait, he looked at me.

SPEAKER_05 1:00

He's been hiding out in the lair.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Oh my god, that's so exciting.

SPEAKER_05 1:03

Here we go.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

The Cardinans together.

SPEAKER_05 1:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

How's it going, team? How's it going? Good. You gonna come join us on the next episode?

SPEAKER_05 1:14

Yeah, you know, I was already you you you've already popped in the last two ones. You should just join next time.

SPEAKER_04 1:19

Randy sees me way too much a day, so I opted for like, no, I'm not gonna torture him one more minute. I I love hanging out with him. I love hanging out with you. Likewise, likewise. We have a ball. It was it was not a good day, but it was still a good day. So all good.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Yeah, I want to hear all that you're working on. You got a cool, you're seeing a cool side of the business.

SPEAKER_04 1:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

cronyms And The New AI Slang

SPEAKER_05 1:48

It's it's interesting and challenging. I feel as though your perspective is is very interesting as one as a listener, and two as somebody who has incorporated codecs and some of these skills into their own personal workflow. I think partially through osmosis to us as a group talking about it and breaking down how to use it.

SPEAKER_04 2:15

Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel like Josh and Jenna, in terms of like after talking with Randy and Jack, I'm like, I really don't know anything. And I'm like, sometimes I'm like, what are you guys talking about? Oh yeah, all the time. What's that new acronym that you just like pronounced to me? Because I don't know what that means.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Oh my god, the text exchanges. I'm like, I feel so smart and cool that I'm on this thread, but I do not know what you guys are talking about. Oh shit. No.

SPEAKER_05 2:49

We need to we need to start a like an Instagram blast group of what it is that is uh yeah is going on or yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:59

Jenna, I I'm thinking from a marketing perspective, is if you can pull out all like those acronyms or those or those new verbiage that they come up with, um, and you could do a whole campaign on that.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Oh, you're totally right. And we all and also just for personal use, I need like a dictionary.

SPEAKER_04 3:19

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, dictionary.

SPEAKER_02 3:22

That would be great.

SPEAKER_04 3:23

Yeah, yeah. No, it's it's it reminds me of the Gen Z like um acronyms that they use in text that everybody, only the Gen Z knows. It's the same thing with uh codecs and Claude developers. There's a whole lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Yeah, with your with your pool boy slang.

unknown 3:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:42

Yeah. Playwright.

SPEAKER_05 3:43

Yeah, I don't know. I'm I'm even guilty of doing it today. Randy had to had to explain it, and I'm like, oh yeah, shoot. I'm I I'm starting to take some of these things for granted now.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

I'm glad I'm thank you for asking, Randy, because I was about to be like, um, what's what's playwright?

SPEAKER_05 4:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Yeah, you're welcome.

SPEAKER_05 4:06

Yeah, I just I put that for granted because I've been I remember I used to have to write code like a caveman uh to actually have it go to this browser specifically and then find this div and then click it. Dot click parent. And I'm like, oh my god. Uh the the the fact that I had to actually write web scrapers to scrape company data by hand. Oh my lord. What a so what a ban.

SPEAKER_04 4:38

So Jack updated my codex. And ever since Jack updated my codex, I've been blocked by LinkedIn twice. Oh, you're kidding me. Wait, what happened? Wait, this is news to me. Wait, this is good for the pod. Wait, what happened? Yeah, so code codex is no longer logging in and using playwright, it's using Versel. So before it used to open up a browser and act like a human being with the mouse and typing in stuff. Now Jack doesn't even have it open up the browser, and they picked up on that. And they're like, they they log you out of your account, they send you this message, and it says, it looks like you're using some sort of automation, and we want authentic users on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_05 5:23

Oh, bullshit. You oh bullshit. Authentic users on LinkedIn. That's an Autymoron.

SPEAKER_04 5:29

Twice in like two days, ever since Jack.

SPEAKER_05 5:33

It's it's really amazing what is doing. So now we're gonna learn about proxies, and now we're gonna learn how to rotate proxies to its shield where it shield where it's it's coming from.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

You'll have to, it's not just a proxy, it's um they they have statistics on like what a normal human would do in a normal day, and like like when you're using like a fast agentic browser, it's gonna like it's gonna whip through LinkedIn like way way faster than a human.

SPEAKER_05 6:05

So like yeah, somehow this guy wrote and drafted a post every day at exactly 7 a.m. in the morning and then posted it within six seconds.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

He's consistent.

SPEAKER_05 6:16

I don't know, he's pretty concise.

SPEAKER_04 6:19

No, I think I think the death blow was his reaching out to 2,000 companies. Oh, come on.

SPEAKER_03 6:27

I didn't know you were using it to do that in like in like two days or something, or like a day or like a week or something.

SPEAKER_04 6:32

It was like in five business hours.

SPEAKER_05 6:35

Why is there traffic from this rural location in Maine?

gentic Outreach That Actually Gets Replies

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Did it work though?

SPEAKER_04 6:41

Oh, Jenna, it's absolutely insane. It is truly insane. Like awesome. No context in terms of here's just a list of companies. Go find me the CEO, go sign find me the COO, and go find me the CRO, get their contact information and send them messages. And the messages are tailored based on what they've recently posted on in relationship to cybersecurity. That is great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Wow. And have people written back?

SPEAKER_04 7:16

Like is it Oh, yeah. People are writing back. Ask Randy how many people are writing back to yours?

SPEAKER_05 7:23

Oh gosh, I have like hundreds. And even more, how many, how many know they're not speaking with you?

SPEAKER_04 7:30

Yeah, they don't know that they're not speaking with us, Randy and myself.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

That and they're not writing anything weird. It's all like you feel better. They're writing back though. You mean the agents? Yeah, sorry, the agents, the agents.

SPEAKER_03 7:42

Oh no, they they're they're writing uh honestly, like no, no bullshit. I'm not like they're writing better than I would do it for sure. I'm naturally like uh what do you call it? Like uh introverted. So it's like it's hard for me to like it's like takes energy for me to like reach out to people and like you know, and it's like a draining exercise for me to like do the reach out. So and this is kind of why it's a bummer that LinkedIn is like penalizing you know, people like me and Joe for trying to use AI agents, because like for me, like you know, it's it's like somebody who's an extrovert has a natural advantage over somebody like me. Like, like I like I was watching the agents, like I'm not like you know, like I'd have them up and I would watch them use LinkedIn and reach out to people, and I'm like, oh shit. I'm like, that's but like when it responds, I'm like that's better than what I would have done. But I had I had given it the messages originally, like you know, I'd give it like say this, try to say that.

SPEAKER_02 8:37

What is the interface for computer use? Are you just telling your agent to spin up a com like how does it interact with your computer? Like, how does it know what your computer is?

SPEAKER_04 8:49

Well, what Jack was explaining is you have Playwright and now Vercel. Those are the computer use agents that we chose for your browser. For your browser. For your browser. Browser use agents, correct. Yeah. So as long as you have a browser window open and you've authenticated to your browser, although Jack made it so I don't even need to authenticate. So if I'm logged out, it'll log me in and we'll start performing whatever I tasked it to do, Josh. So I can give it a list. Hey, I did. I gave it a list of 50 people the prior week from an infographic and said, please reach out to these people and make an introductory email to them saying, Hey, I'm interested in understanding um uh your interest in OT security. And it took it from the graphic. It not only did it take it from the graphic, it found the graphic without me even to to give it to the agent. It found the graphic on LinkedIn, on the person that I told who posted it. It found all the people's uh names from the graphic, searched them on LinkedIn, and auto-connected to all of them, and then it wrote a message to every single one of those people on my behalf.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

And that's how you get banned from LinkedIn. And that's how you get banned from LinkedIn, yeah. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Uh but that's something like slogan or spirit that like you would want an employee, but it's so hard to like find someone that cares that much and is that clever, and now they're just at your fingertips.

ull Access Permissions And Real Security

SPEAKER_03 10:29

Yeah, yeah. Josh had asked for you know computer use, and we had talked about like using a web browser. But for those that don't know, you have to do one more thing. And if you're using like cloud code or codex, that one more thing is you have to give that agent full access to your local machine, which it's usually like a a software flag, so it's like dash dash, you know, dangerously skip you know, permissions. There's every coder has something different, like codex app, which is a graphic user interface, it's not nerdy. There's literally, I'm looking at it right now, there's like a drop-down combo box where you you know it's you just click full access. Okay. And that when you when you say to Codex, browse the web, find me 15 contacts, and then build me a spreadsheet of all of those things. It'll use playwright to browse the web and do that. And if you've selected the full access tab at the very beginning before you made that request, it now has the ability to take what it browsed and then use your local system computer use, all the functions that your computer has available to it to build that spreadsheet. So there's two things full access as well as the playwright browser, and that's how everybody is basically turning these coding agents into the employees.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

The security. Do we what's what are our feelings about the security? Am I being too conservative?

SPEAKER_04 11:56

Yeah. Well, I had a I decided to just set up a whole separate computer, Jenna. Like so I got like a like everybody else, but I beat everybody before OpenClaw. I bought a Mac Mini. Okay. I put that, I I put that on my my desktop. Jack walks upstairs and says, Hey, what's that? I said, That's my new agent.

SPEAKER_05 12:22

Please tell me you're not gonna be one of these idiots who's downloading open claw onto your machine and exposing all of your data for all the world to see.

SPEAKER_04 12:32

Well, hey, now I got I have a clean machine, right?

SPEAKER_05 12:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 12:37

And I only give it access to what I needed to give it access to.

SPEAKER_05 12:41

Exactly. You're you're you're handling it smart and in the right way. Unlike me, I just have it running dangerously, bypass all permissions on all my computers, and it'll probably not delete my OS.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 12:55

I'll I'll I'll take that chance.

SPEAKER_02 12:57

It's been working well so far.

SPEAKER_05 12:58

Yeah. I was I I was skeptical about it when I was first hearing about it. I'm like, oh, this can do like so much harm on my machine, and I'm like, oh well, if I just press a button, it'll stop whatever it's doing. Like as long as I'm watching it, it's it's fine. I can I can press the spacebar before it does anything too horrible that I regret. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:19

Randy, did you bring up the the new XAI OS?

SPEAKER_03 13:23

Or I didn't pull up the actual article ahead of time, but um Tes Tesla came up with uh there was a patent a few da a few weeks ago. Um it's if you guys are nerdy and you know TCP IP, it's a it's a network communication protocol. Um it's how computers talk to each other. Basically, they created a new version of that. And the the reason why they did that, I won't get into like the nerdy, but the reason why they're doing that is they want like computers, PCs, laptops, cell phones, and other devices to basically be operating systemless. So there's gonna not be Mac OS or anything. It's just gonna be kind of like what Jack said at the beginning, it's just gonna be like uh like a text box or like a like a like a video, like it'll be like a camera button, and it'll it'll basically take all of the telemetry from your edge device and it'll stream it with this new Tesla TCP IP protocol to AI data centers. So you're basically eliminating operating systems entirely. Um which we can see in a couple.

SPEAKER_04 14:34

No Android, no iOS, no Microsoft.

SPEAKER_05 14:39

Yeah. So basically it's a way for them to stream their data OS list directly into AI for consumption, for training, whatever machine learning model or whatever you need it to perform. Yeah, or for having, let's say, let's say you Elon Jr. has some sort of agent that he wants to connect to five video cameras outside of his house. He can just ask his agent to check it, and there doesn't even need to be any OS level computer use. It can just stream directly over this new TC protocol, is what you're saying. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:19

Something like that. No UI, no UX.

SPEAKER_05 15:21

You're just gonna talk to literally a blank screen and you're gonna say, We're post-UI, I've been saying it for six months and we're here. Yeah, it already exists today.

SPEAKER_04 15:31

It's insane. Like people don't know, like, yeah, it's scary.

SPEAKER_05 15:37

Yeah. The biggest issue that I've seen is just that the black box scares people. People don't know it to type into the black box and they get scared. And I'm like, just just ask it. Just ask it whatever. Whatever you were going to ask me about, just ask it to that, and it will tell you better than I could.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

You know, Jack, that's a really good point. I don't think psychologically people are going to accept it. Speaking of adoption, I tried to pitch a product once to a group, and they were like, I just don't have the resources for people to sit here in front of this black box and figure out what it is that I need. They want it packaged, they want buttons, they want a little bow on top, and they want their folks to be able to turn the key and get exactly what they want at the end of the day, even if it's 60% inefficient.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Agree. I think like this is the no UI is what the future's gonna be, but that time in between, it's all about the there's gonna be minimal UI. Because people are getting lost in the black box. They're like, I don't know, like I can it can do anything. That's like, so you just like you wrap it up and you're like, oh, this is this is all if it's this is it'll solve this exact problem. And that makes people feel comfortable. But as they get more used to it, they're yeah, like because now I just talk to my computer all day. Like I don't even type anymore.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

I think what's gonna happen is that a bunch of people will figure exactly what you just said, which is probably gonna be people like us, and they're gonna sell it to the people who don't want to use two brain cells to put it all Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 17:01

AI can have a whole conversation about this for like two hours the other day. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:07

It's all the critical thinking skills. So like it's people that have critical thinking skills will be able to adopt that to your point, Josh.

SPEAKER_05 17:15

And create something for the people who have no critical thinking skills.

SPEAKER_04 17:19

That will still always want a UI. So there's gonna be an a UI-less world and a UI-based world. And it's like that's I hate to say it, it's it's it'll probably be the haves and the haves nots, is the irony about it. And I think your job role will be able to will be separated based on your critical thinking skills, not your skills. Like, can you think outside the box? Can you create something? Can you imagine what it could be and be able to narrate that to this black box? And then that will essentially be what all the people that need the UI will go to that new thing that you've created.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

Yeah, the visionaries.

SPEAKER_04 18:07

Yeah, and I don't even think that they'll have to be visionaries, I think they'll just be people that can critically think and just, you know, and then there's people that are just like, I'm broke, I I need that button because I don't know what to type in the box.

ritical Thinking As The New Divider

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Yeah, and I think that just like people are they're just overwhelmed. And I think there's some that naturally like for fun, I like to figure things out and I'm very curious and I'm a nerd. I think we all are. But for other folks, maybe they're just like, I just want to enjoy my life, or I'm like I'm so overwhelmed with other things, like it's not relaxing to me to try to figure one more thing out. They're the audience for the rapper.

SPEAKER_05 18:40

Yes, yeah, yeah. And that's why YC is dumping like however many hundreds of millions of dollars into all of these GPT rappers. Yeah, yeah. They're like, oh yeah, but yeah, Clule. Sure. Hey, yeah, hey, don't knock it. I'm we're I'm knocking Cluley. I'm knocking Clue.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

I I kind of shit on rappers a little bit in like 20 into 2023, maybe. And um now I I I think it makes sense. I think it solves a problem.

SPEAKER_05 19:08

Because now you figured out how to create a rapper, right? So now you're like, oh yeah, why would I not just do that?

SPEAKER_00 19:14

I think you nailed it. I'm like, no.

SPEAKER_04 19:21

Oh, this is a good idea. All right, let's go over to my codec. Hey, quad, can you make this thing for me? There you go. Yeah, and then you put them on GitHub. Yeah. Alright. Good night. Thank you.