Day 500 of the Agent Era: What's Disappearing, What's Being Born — Why We Should Stop Investing in GUI-Minded Software

🚥 This is a crossover podcast between ZhenFund's "True Words" and Crossing.

Last year, Crossing's opening podcast predicted 2025 as the Year of the Agent. Now, 500 days have passed since that episode. Around Day 100, Manus went viral and Claude 3.5 Sonnet laid the groundwork for Agents. Around Day 300, Claude Code took over everyone's feeds.

At this point, Day 500, breakthroughs and new concepts in the Agent space are still erupting nonstop. In this episode, we use one throughline to connect the changes of the past 500 days: GUI exits → Headless rises → CLI revival → Skills packaging → Agentic Economy germinates.

We try to explore: On Day 500 of the Year of the Agent, what is disappearing and what is being born?

What may be disappearing isn't the GUI itself, but the premise that "humans must serve as conveyor belts in the workflow."

What is being born isn't just new product forms, but an entirely new division of labor and pricing system: Headless workflows, CLI revival, Skills packaging, and the emerging Agentic Economy.

This episode's guests: Jack Zhong (Investment Director, ZhenFund), Guizang (AI developer)

If you're looking for clarity amid concept explosion, this episode may offer a framing perspective to help you connect these changes.

🎬 Our video podcast will simultaneously launch on Koji's WeChat Channels, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, YouTube, and other platforms.

📒 The transcript will be published on the CrossingCrossing WeChat official account.

🟢 Opening: 500 Days of Agent

00:18 What's happened in the 500 days since the Year of the Agent began?

03:39 One-sentence summary of 500 days: Context management has become increasingly important

04:04 What hasn't changed: new concepts being demystified; what hasn't changed: model capabilities steadily improving

🟢 Keyword One: Headless 04:31 Software without interfaces — just databases and tools

06:40 GUI is a patch for human cognitive limitations

09:52 When building products, don't prioritize the interface; focus on what users actually need

10:47 Notion, Lark, and Google Suite: how legacy software faces the AI entry point

12:17 Gmail authorizes via Codex, Agents bypass GUI to access directly

15:56 The wave of companies proactively launching MCP/CLI is a significant trend from an investor's perspective

16:37 As a PM, the most important thing is defining the problem — don't solve problems already solved in the previous era

🟢 Keyword Two: CLI 18:36 CLI's core: command-line execution, plain text, naturally aligned with AI

19:47 AI solves CLI's biggest obstacle: humans simply can't remember thousands of commands

20:54 Dominant apps like WeChat, Xiaohongshu, and Meituan still haven't launched CLI

21:17 Opening CLI creates a defensive dilemma, requiring tremendous resolve and courage

23:59 If tools can reach users better through Agents, they should open CLI

25:07 Which product would you most want to see open CLI?

26:25 Young people are now chatting on Douyin — 100 million DAU

🟢 Keyword Three: Skill 27:38 Guizang's PPT Skill

29:23 grill-me: letting Claude Code interrogate you

30:59 Skills self-accumulate, distilling your taste into reusable outputs

32:13 Are Skills a long-term existence or transitional? Enhanced model capabilities will gradually absorb some

34:25 Who is most likely to become China's Claude Code?

35:56 Xiaohongshu Skill Store and the commercial value of Skills

39:29 CLI/Skill/MCP each apply to different capability scenarios

🟢 Keyword Four: Agentic Economy 39:45 To-Agent infrastructure: sandbox, memory systems, payments

40:59 We're still in the great infrastructure era; tokens becoming smarter and cheaper is the main theme

42:18 Token prices will fluctuate, influenced by energy, electricity, and model performance

🟢 Keyword Five: OpenClaw 43:23 OpenClaw's 100-day hype faded rapidly, but what did it leave behind?

43:58 Its greatest significance was shaping consensus, helping the public complete their cognitive shift toward Agents

44:31 It proved the value of IM format — users need to converse with AI in familiar interfaces

🟢 Keyword Six: Token Grant 45:18 Providing AI developers with ¥50,000 in compute support

45:45 Code Pilot already has 6,000 GitHub stars — sufficiently open, localized Agent

46:42 A digital life experiment, evolving from 0 lines of code to 100,000 lines

47:27 What entrepreneurs lack today isn't money, but Tokens

50:13 The next Douyin may not be a new form — it may be Douyin with 10x production capacity

🟢 Additional Notes:

Your First Agent, We Top Up for You

Guizang: From Prompt to Harness, Context Is Everything

I Gave Him a Dream: Surpass Claude Code

🎪 ZhenFund and CrossingCrossing jointly launch "Token Grant," providing each selected project with ¥50,000 in Token costs, supporting you from the earliest stages to build the next generation of AI-native products. [Application portal]

Subscribe to "Crossing": 🚦 We follow the industry transformations and new entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the new wave of AI technology.

🚦 Crossing is Steve Jobs' metaphor for Apple — standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, where great products are born. AI is transforming every industry. We seek out, interview, and unite a new generation of AI entrepreneurs and proactive actors in the AI era. Together with them, we explore and embrace new changes, new possibilities.

👦🏻 Host Koji: I founded Crossing, launched AI Hacker House — a community space for the new generation of AI entrepreneurs — and serve as Venture Partner at ZhenFund. I believe technology, especially AI, is the greatest value-creation opportunity of our generation. Koji's Jike, Koji's website