General-purpose AI agent product that previously led the Remote Labor Index at 2.5 percent.
Baoyu argues that the bottleneck in software development has shifted from building professional software to making it agent-callable, letting humans only preview and fine-tune, and serving long-tail personalization. He contends that GUIs are inefficient for agents, that CLI, MCP and code are the agent-friendly interfaces, and that software capabilities will be atomized into composable primitives orchestrated by agents, diminishing the value of complex UIs.
Manus co-founder Zhang Tao said at Web Summit that the company has dissolved frontend and backend roles internally, with product managers and designers now committing code, while its public job page still lists traditional positions because "the outside world hasn't caught up." Engineering interviews have also shifted from coding puzzles to a four-hour task solved with Manus, followed by a review of the candidate's full collaboration log with the AI.
Anthropic's new Fable 5.2 tops the Remote Labor Index from Scale Labs and CAIS with 41.3 percent, a benchmark measuring whether AI agents complete real paid freelance tasks at professional quality. A year ago the leader, Manus, managed just 2.5 percent, underscoring rapid gains in practical agent capability.