Agents slash the cost of consumer vigilance, clawing back what businesses skim from inattention
signulll · x · 2026-09-12
signulll argues agents dramatically reduce the transaction cost of being an attentive consumer. Businesses profit from inertia — forgotten subscriptions, missed return windows, unclaimed warranties, price discrimination, hostile cancellation flows — because each item isn't worth 20 minutes of your life. An agent's marginal cost of vigilance approaches zero, enabling auto-cancellations, refund requests, price-drop rebooking, bill negotiation, provider switching, rewards optimization, and more, letting users capture the economic surplus businesses currently extract from human inattention.
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