AI agents are the most consequential technology of our time. Most of what gets written about them is benchmarks and demos. The real decisions—who controls the infrastructure, where the value lands, what happens when autonomous systems operate on trust alone—are being made right now. Sideband is the signal: builds, breakthroughs, and the hard questions about control, trust, and money.

I build with these tools and write about what I find. Some weeks that’s a 700-word argument about pricing or enforcement. Some weeks it’s a build session on video where the model doesn’t listen for twenty minutes. The format follows the story.

I’m Shawn Yeager. I’ve spent thirty years commercializing frontier technology—early web browsers, Bitcoin payment infrastructure, now AI agents. The cycle is always the same: powerful technology shows up, and someone has to decide whether it empowers people or extracts from them.