Someone tells their assistant, "set this up in the tool for me."
The agent opens your product and starts working. It clicks through the flow, fills the fields, and then hits the step that always confuses people. The one where a human squints, hovers over the tooltip, maybe checks the help doc, and eventually figures it out.
The agent does none of that. It can't. So it guesses, or it loops, or it quietly gives up. And you never hear about it, because agents don't file tickets.
That user was not a person. And there are going to be a lot more of them.
The user on the other end is changing shape
For twenty years we designed software for a specific creature: a human with eyes, patience, and judgment. Everything in the second half of a product's life, the adoption and support half, quietly depends on that creature.
A tooltip needs eyes to see it. A product tour needs patience to sit through it. A help article needs someone willing to stop, go find it, and read it. A good bug report needs judgment about what went wrong and the goodwill to tell you.
Now more of your users are AI agents acting on a person's behalf. And an agent has none of those things. It doesn't see your carefully placed tooltip. It won't sit through onboarding. It can't intuit that the button moved. When it hits a broken flow, it doesn't get frustrated and email support. It just fails, silently, at machine speed, across every session at once.
The whole after-ship layer was built for a user that's being replaced. That's the shift worth staring at.
Friction that annoyed humans is a hard stop for agents
Here's the uncomfortable part. Your existing friction didn't go away. It got sharper.
When a person hits a confusing step, they bring a lifetime of pattern-matching to it. They've used a thousand apps. They guess that the gear icon is settings. They tolerate a little ambiguity and muddle through. Most of the time, badly and slowly, they get there.
An agent brings none of that forgiveness. The half-labeled button, the step that assumes context you never made explicit, the flow that breaks the moment you shipped a change, all of it stops a person for a minute and stops an agent cold. The exact friction your team learned to live with because "users mostly figure it out" is the friction agents cannot figure out.
And when it fails, you're blind to it. A confused human is at least a possible ticket. A confused agent is nothing, no signal, no complaint, just a task that didn't complete and a user who blames your product for it.
This raises the stakes, it doesn't lower them
The optimistic read is that agents are precise, so they'll be easier users. It's backwards.
Agents operate at scale and speed. A person hitting your broken flow is one annoyed user on a Tuesday. An agent hitting the same flow is every agent session hitting it, simultaneously, forever, until someone fixes the underlying thing. The blast radius of a single bad step goes from one to all-of-them.
Which means the after-ship work, guiding a user to the outcome and getting the broken thing fixed, stops being a nice-to-have you can absorb with a bigger support team. There is no support team big enough to answer questions that never get asked by users who can't ask them.
What to do this week
You don't need to predict the agent future. You can test your exposure to it today.
Take your single most-used flow. Now walk it as if you were an agent with no eyes and no intuition: no tooltip you can read, no tour, no help center to consult, no ability to ask a human. Just the raw product and a goal.
Where does it break? Where does completing the task depend on a human noticing something, guessing something, or going to read something? Every one of those spots is invisible friction today and a hard stop the moment the user is an agent.
That list is your post-production gap, made brutally literal. It was always there. Humans were just papering over it with effort you couldn't see.
This is the gap we built Deway to close: one layer that guides and resolves for every user, human or agent, and exposes the same live understanding of your product through an API so the agents operating it aren't flying blind. But you don't need us to run the walk above.
We spent a decade making software easier for people to build. The next decade is about who, or what, actually uses it.
Your product's next power user can't see your interface. Who is helping them through it?
Alon Binman is the co-founder of Deway (deway.ai), an AI-native layer that runs everything after you ship. Before Deway, Alon spent 15+ years at the intersection of product and customer success, including roles as a Product Manager, founder, data and product strategy consultant, and Senior Solution Architect at Mixpanel. You can reach Alon on LinkedIn.