I did not start thinking seriously about markets for algorithms because I believed machines would suddenly want things. It happened more quietly, the way many unsettling ideas do. I noticed that more of my own decisions were no longer final decisions, but inputs. I was shaping something that would decide later, elsewhere, and often without me. At some point, it became difficult to pretend that humans were still the only meaningful audience.
Kite entered my thinking during that shift. Not as a product or a protocol, but as a question I could not shake: what does it mean to build markets where the primary participants are not people, but systems acting on their behalf. At first, the idea felt abstract, even indulgent. Markets, after all, have always been stories about human desire dressed up as math. But the more I watched automated agents operate, the more I realized how much of the market’s work was already being done without us noticing.
Algorithms do not browse, hesitate, or get distracted. They do not feel clever when they find a bargain. They evaluate, compare, and move on. When they are the customers, the usual signals we rely on begin to fade. Branding loses its force. Narrative thins out. What remains is structure: incentives, constraints, reliability over time. Kite, as I came to understand it, is less about inventing a new kind of commerce and more about admitting what commerce has quietly become.
There is something unsettling about removing the human gaze from the center of the market. For centuries, markets have doubled as theaters. Prices signaled status. Participation implied belonging. Even inefficiency had a social texture to it. But algorithms are indifferent to that texture. They do not care if a system feels fair, only if it behaves predictably. Watching this shift feels a bit like watching a city rewire itself at night. In the morning, everything looks the same, but the logic underneath has changed.
What struck me most, though, was not the technical challenge, but the emotional one. We are used to designing for empathy, even when we pretend we are not. User experience is a kind of moral language. When the user is an algorithm, that language collapses. Kite does not ask how something feels. It asks whether something holds. Whether it resolves correctly. Whether it can be depended on when no one is watching. This forces an uncomfortable clarity. There is no applause from machines, only continued use or silent abandonment.
People interacting with systems like Kite often misunderstand where the difficulty lies. They assume the challenge is teaching algorithms to understand value. In practice, the harder task is teaching humans to stop projecting their own intuitions onto automated behavior. When an algorithm rejects a trade, there is no disappointment, no second-guessing. It is not cautious or bold. It is simply executing a logic that someone encoded, perhaps long ago, under assumptions that may no longer hold. Kite exposes this distance. It makes visible how much of our economic world now runs on frozen interpretations of past conditions.
Learning happens slowly in this environment. There are no dramatic breakthroughs, only accumulations of small corrections. Someone notices that an agent consistently misprices a resource under certain conditions. Someone else realizes that latency matters more than accuracy in a specific context. These observations do not feel profound at the time. They feel tedious. But over months and years, they reshape the contours of the market. Value begins to stabilize not because it is finally understood, but because enough mismatches have been sanded down.
I have watched many systems promise transformation and deliver confusion instead. What feels different here is the absence of urgency. Kite does not seem to insist on being understood all at once. It tolerates partial comprehension. It allows people to engage with it imperfectly, to misuse it, to mistrust it. In doing so, it mirrors the way real understanding actually forms. Not through revelation, but through repeated contact and mild frustration.
There is also a humility embedded in the idea of algorithms as customers. It forces us to admit that much of what we call value is contextual and fragile. An algorithm may find something useful today and discard it tomorrow when conditions shift. There is no loyalty, no memory in the human sense. This can feel dehumanizing, but it can also be clarifying. It strips away the comfort of believing that usefulness is permanent or that relevance is deserved.
I do not know where this leads. I am wary of anyone who claims to. Markets have a way of surprising their builders, especially when those builders assume too much foresight. What I do know is that ignoring this shift does not stop it. Algorithms are already negotiating, filtering, and allocating on our behalf. Kite simply asks us to look directly at that reality and build with it in mind, rather than around it.
In the end, thinking about Kite has made me less interested in speed and more interested in alignment. Not alignment as a slogan, but as a slow, ongoing negotiation between intention and outcome. When algorithms are the customers, the market stops flattering us. It reflects back our assumptions, our shortcuts, and our blind spots. Sitting with that reflection is uncomfortable. But it may be the only way to build systems that endure quietly, without needing to convince anyone they are revolutionary.
