I Trust My Car More Than My AI Agent. Here Is Why.
Digital Thoughts
SubscribeSign in
I Trust My Car More Than My AI Agent. That Gap Is Where We’re Going.<br>No real AI hardware yet, agents still break, and trust is the bottleneck. Where I think the next few years actually go, from someone who lives with one.
Pawel Jozefiak<br>Jun 17, 2026
Share
My agent made me a lot more effective. It also made me watch my own back more.<br>Both of those are true, and I have stopped pretending the second one away. I built my own agent, I gave it its own machine, and it does real work for me every day. It knows who I am, not just what I want. The effectiveness is real. So is the quiet voice in the back of my head that now tracks what might break while the thing is running.<br>That voice is the interesting part. It points straight at what this whole wave is actually about. Trust.
Digital Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
Trust is a mileage problem
Think about a car. When I get in mine, I assume it starts. I assume it will not catch fire on the way to Katowice. I never sat down and decided to trust it. I drove it something like a hundred thousand kilometers and the trust built itself. I know its sounds. I know the one strange thing it does on a cold morning. I can predict it because I have repeated it that many times.<br>Trust is repetition plus outcomes you can predict. That is the whole recipe. There is always room for a bad day, a flat tyre, a dead battery in February. Although the range of what can go wrong is small, and I know the edges of it.<br>With an agent that recipe only half works. For some tasks I have the same calm I have with the car. For others I am still a new driver, both hands on the wheel, watching the road like it owes me money.<br>Deterministic things earn trust faster
Here is the pattern I keep running into. The more deterministic the task, the faster I trust it. A script that renames the same files the same way every night, I stopped watching that months ago. It is boring, and boring is exactly the point.<br>The more agentic the task, the more I am looking at a black box. Open-ended work, many steps, judgment calls, recovering from its own mistakes halfway through a run. That is where outcomes spread out and prediction gets hard. The model matters here. So does the architecture around it, the tools it can call, the memory it carries. I wrote a whole post about what happens when an agent meets the messy real world and stops behaving like the demo.<br>The ceiling right now is technical and it is not a mystery. Context limits. Memory that does not persist the way I want it to. Retrieval that grabs the wrong thing at the wrong moment. Tool calls that fail quietly. An agent that gets stuck and does not notice it is stuck. Every builder I talk to is fighting the same short list. I wrote about drawing hard edges around an agent so it stays inside what it is good at in the bounded agent post, and about giving it a memory that actually compounds in the one on my self-improving agent.<br>None of these limits are permanent. I have watched all of them get better over the past year, in jumps, never on a tidy schedule. That detail matters for everything that comes next.<br>Now run it forward
Assume the boring version of the future. Steady improvement, the kind we have already been getting. Better models, more stable tools, memory that holds, retrieval that lands where you point it. The frontier gets the headlines. The floor is the thing that moves people’s lives , and the floor is what I am watching.<br>Right now an agent like mine is a nerd object. You need to be deep in code, or at least deep in tinkering, to get real value out of it. Most people who say they use AI mean a chat window. Most companies that say they use AI are in the 88% with almost nothing to show for it. The capability is sitting right there. The on-ramp is the missing piece.<br>Apple is making the most interesting bet on that on-ramp. At WWDC this month they finally committed to the big Siri overhaul, an assistant that can actually chain multi-step tasks, with an agent layer wired into the App Store so you can hand off things like booking a table or running your smart home. They are building it on Google’s Gemini, which tells you that even Apple decided the raw model is becoming a commodity and the product is the assistant on top. It will not ship in the EU at launch, the usual regulatory reason. I think this is the right move and it might genuinely work. Putting the agent in front of normal customers is the whole game.<br>Everyone’s agent is a lot of agents
Here is the part that gets skipped. When everyone has an agent, the browsing stops being human. Your software does it for you, at machine speed.<br>When my agent works, it touches more of the web in an hour than I would in a day. It crawls, it reads, it calls APIs, it goes and shops. Multiply that by a few hundred...