Agency, aura farming and the great divide

I was in Stockholm over the weekend as HackEurope took over Norrsken House, part of what was happening simultaneously across European hubs for what is billed as the EU’s largest hackathon.

1000 participants (out of 4000+ applications), 24 hours to build.

Within that time frame, a team had built an agent-orchestrated wildfire prevention system that predicts dry-lightning strike zones from geospatial and weather data, autonomously dispatches drones, and triggers cloud-seeding payload drops before fires start.

Coming back, I am not sure I fully understand what is happening right now.

For me, this is the first time i am seeing this up front.

A couple of years ago I was exposed to the idea that you should push progress forward as fast as possible, that technological acceleration is not something to be slowed down or carefully managed, but something to lean into, even if it gets a bit chaotic. The belief that building faster, iterating faster, deploying faster is not just inevitable, but desirable, because the upside compounds faster than the downside catches up. This idea sits in the same techno-optimist tradition often associated with the patron saint of the blue hyperlink. We're simply renegades with our orange ones.

It was around the same time you saw the e/acc in the kings of Silicon Valleys bios. Effective accelerationism (e/acc) was the ideological movement about unrestricted technological progress being a solution to universal human problems - climate change, war and poverty. The notion that “everything is solved by AI”.

(I’m pro eu/acc btw)30

e/acc: hyperbolic curve logo

For me, seeing up close how fast the technologoical advancements have improved was insane.

H. Stebbings: “where the fuck is value in a world of anthropic and claude code wiping billions of dollars off a stock market, how should i think about that? “

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski: “You should think that software cost of creating software is going down to zero (…) that means that like everyone will be able to generate software at any point of time”

-20VC episode

Speed of development is no longer the moat.

Agency and aura farming

Non-technical people are shipping thousands lines of code without reading them, as you don’t have to anymore. Local agents will catch your bugs, prompt back in Claude Code and fix it in a new loop.

Speed used to be the advantage, but now everyone is fast - or at least fast enough that it stops being interesting. So execution in the traditional sense starts to flatten. The gap between having an idea and having something live is collapsing, and it is collapsing for a lot of people at the same time.

Agency is becoming the scarce resource. For a long time, agency was basically execution. The person who actually got things done. That was already rare, but at least it was clear.

But now it feels different.

There is still execution, but there is something on top of it - and at a Hackathon it is very clear it is going on.

In Sthlm there was a few people that everyone talked about. And boy I tell you, they know it. They lean into it, double down and maxes out on everything that signals that. Brainrot-chronically-online-gen-alpha-types have decided to call it aura farming.

It sounds stupid to use a tik-tok pheonomen, but I do think it works. You build a sense that something is already happening and others should probably pay attention. Something is cooking.

Why was Roy Lee able to raise tens of millions for Cluely? He focused more on creating virality on social media and framing a story that made SF wet. He was aura farming and he was leaning into it with all he could - and still is. However, it seems his aura is fading a bit. You would think the same if you’ve read Sam Kriss’ latest article “Child’s Play”. Highly suggest you do.

So, if everyone can build, then the question is who actually moves and gets people hyped about it.

Now, this is a great time to refer back to my colleagues recent piece “who really benefits when venture moves in” about the rise of founders houses, shared desks, selection risk and the upstream battle for alpha. It makes sense we’ve seen a rise in these founder buildings, shared desks, the hackathons, etc. It’s a way for investors to get differentiated access to exceptional people. To detect and evaluate agency. And for newborn founders, these days bordering on the infantile, to aura-farm.

The great divide

With speed no longer being the moat, local agents soon in everyones machines, and AI democratising who gets the opportunity to build great products, we will see a greater divide than ever before between those with agency and those without.

Most people are not built to act without constraints. They are used to structure, direction, deadlines, approvals, processes that make it clear what to do next. Even in startups, there is usually a frame that holds everything together.

Take that away, and a lot of people stall.

You can already feel the split forming, even if people don’t talk about it directly.

There are people who use AI to compound agency, and there are people stuck in prompt & pray.

There are people who move, and there are people who wait.

And the gap between them does not stay small, because everything around them is compounding. If you move, you get feedback, you learn, you improve, and you move again. If you wait, you are not just standing still, you are falling behind a system that is getting faster without you.

At some point, hesitation is not neutral anymore and it will cost you.

We are used to thinking the advantage comes from knowing more, or even building better.

The difference is increasingly just whether you decide to move.

The divide between those who do something and those who hesitate will grow bigger than ever before..