Garry Tan (YC president) left a great comment on a thread about emerging professions — pointing out that we all imagined the future would have us doing something like "boson sculpting" out of a sci-fi novel, but reality turned out to be considerably more mundane.
A whole new layer of jobs is forming around AI agents right now. Models got smart enough, people are starting to treat them like a "second brain" or a full-on assistant — but almost nobody knows how to actually set them up properly.
New professions of 2026
- **Personal agent designer** — the person who builds you a custom assistant, wires up the right tools, defines behavioral rules, and configures access to your email, code, or finances so the agent doesn't go off the rails.
- **Second brain engineer** — a specialist in digital memory architecture: RAG, memory banks, knowledge graphs, and integrating all of it with your Notion + AI setup. Essentially, they build long-term memory for your neural nets so the thing actually understands the context of your life.
- **Context editor** — someone who masterfully juggles system prompts, keeps the context window clean, and decides what the agent should "remember" permanently vs. what can be dropped — so you're not burning tokens on noise or hallucinating garbage.
Bottom line: the agent era has built out its own industry. Hiring a specialist to fine-tune your digital clone, dial in its reasoning for your specific needs, and clean up its context is going to be as routine as booking a cleaner or seeing a therapist.