About The Agentic Shift
What the map is
The Agentic Shift is a book of notes from the agentic frontier: what happens to the Web, to software and to society once people act through AI agents. The map is its argument drawn as a graph: 48 ideas connected by 64 links, starting from a single origin, the generalisation of the personal agent, and branching out towards the agent web, civilisation, and the trajectories that follow.
It is not an illustration added after the fact. The diagram and the first notes were started together, in June 2026, and the book grew along the paths the diagram traced.
The book is not finished, and is not meant to be. Its chapters are revised as the shift unfolds, and the map changes with them.
Every node points to the text
Each node is anchored to the exact passages of the book that carry the idea: 105 passages across 19 chapters. Select a node and the reading pane opens at the right chapter, with those passages highlighted. Each dot in the margin of the text leads back to its node.
A node shown in grey is an idea the diagram anticipates but the book has not written yet. It stays on the map as an open question.
Who maintains it
The ideas behind The Agentic Shift are developed by Ludovic Désert. All other ideas the AI may try to add are ruthlessly refused by the author, who never liked being told what to think in the first place.
The upkeep is shared with a dedicated AI agent that works under his direction. The agent helps transcribe, structure and clarify his ideas into written chapters, and turns them into a structured map. This agent is a primitive form of the maintainer presence described in the chapter on living applications. When a chapter is revised, it re-anchors the nodes whose passages have moved, rebuilds the map, updates the French, Spanish and German translations and republishes the site.
A book about delegating to agents, kept up to date by one: the arrangement is deliberate. The Agentic Shift is already under way, just not evenly distributed yet.
Licence and citation
The book and the map are published under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 licence: you may share and adapt them freely for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the author and link to the source.
To cite it: Ludovic Désert, The Agentic Shift, theagenticshift.org, followed by the chapter title and the year of the version you read.
About the author
Ludovic Désert is a French software developer with over 30 years of experience building for the Web. Since 2024, his work focuses on AI agents and their implications for software, the Internet and the way people interact with digital systems.
The Agentic Shift grew out of his attempts to understand where these changes might lead, beyond the immediate applications of AI.