In response to
Contraptions · “Cognitive Mercantilism” · <https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/cognitive-mercantilism> · retrieved Nov 3, 2026
Seed sown by the Cognitive Mercantilism article
If intelligence is a commodity which everyone has access to then intent is the commodity required to access that intelligence. Intent can be bartered for intelligence now. AI Agents allow us to create large intent mining and generation machines which help us acquire a users intent and actually get them what they want. Agentic frameworks which aren't good at this specific jobs end up making the agent orchestrator in question unhappy most of the times. Context is the substrate on which the intent blooms.
Not all knowledge is intelligence. Maybe you can ask for intelligence, but that's not how it will work. At the end of the day the system of trust (human or AI) will determine if the knowledge and analysis returned is intelligent or not.
v2
“major: grammar update in first para and added second para”