I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
i can't believe they're really gonna do it again
the last time stripe shipped a primitive this big, it literally birthed modern saas.
shopify, substack, gumroad, all your fav indie hackers...
they exist only because stripe's payments api let them easily accept money with a few lines of code
yesterday stripe shipped the spending version.
anyone can now get an agent to spend money on their behalf.
if stripe's payments api created saas, this spending api creates autonomous commerce:
a new category of businesses that run on agents buying, booking, restocking, and paying on your behalf
to make that concrete for you, here's some cool ideas you can build now:
1. ai ad managers. you connect your meta, google, and tiktok accounts, set a monthly budget cap, and an agent runs your entire paid strategy.
2. ai procurement agents for ecommerce. they monitor supplier prices, auto-order when costs hit your threshold, send you a morning summary of what they bought and why
3. ai travel agents that actually work. they search, compare, book, and pay within your budget rules. no more toggling between 6 tabs to save $40 on a flight
4. ai bookkeeping agents. they handle the recurring operational payments your business already makes every month (contractor invoices, ad account top-ups, subscriptions, etc)
the 18-month window after a new primitive ships is historically when the category-defining companies get built
if i was building right now i'd pick one of these, find the narrowest possible version of it, and ship before it closes
generational opportunities here imo. good luck!