> engineers who've worked with them (or reviewed their OSS contributions) could validate or challenge that [skill]
I like your idea of verifiable skills but I don’t think the proposal is solid. We need a trusted third-party as a validator so everyone is happy. Otherwise, we bring bias and corruption into this.
The problem is currently solved by professional certification — yes it could be gamed but it provides an official confirmation from a reputable source rather than someone’s word that you’re good.
I did the same thing for a month and saved a lot of money. Thinking about how much you need to pay and how much you’ll have left before handing over the cash is an important step that is often not done for contactless payments.
I can see the point of agent-first workflows in the future where we interact with agent UI instead of SaaS/PaaS dashboards but I don’t think every other problem and subsequently a solution will need to be agentified. A massive chunk of interactions would still require a good-old UI i.e. filing taxes, signing contracts, banking, e-government etc.