Fifteen people in the room and I could not tell if we were ahead of the curve or just talking to ourselves.
The gathering was built around everything agentic, the informal kind where people who actually build the stuff show up to argue about what works. Counting the room afterward, in my head, the way you do, there was one woman, and only two of us bald or close enough to it, James and me. We know each other for a couple of years, done startups prior. James and I also carried something else the room split on without anyone naming it. We were the old hands, the ones with scar tissue from being wrong before. The younger, first time founders in the room ran on gung ho conviction, no scars yet to slow them down. Everyone talked over each other with the easy confidence of people who already agree.
That agreement is not evidence of anything. Research on homophily, the tendency of similar people to cluster, found the pattern structures nearly every kind of network tie there is, friendship, work, advice, who tells whom what. A room like ours is not a special case or a warning sign, it is the ordinary shape of any group that forms around a shared interest. The feeling of being surrounded by people who get it is not a signal. It is just what clustering looks like from inside the cluster.
History gives a cleaner test than my own memory of one evening. The Homebrew Computer Club met in Menlo Park through the seventies, a small, homogeneous group of hobbyists, and Steve Wozniak debuted the Apple I there in 1976. Long Term Capital Management was every bit as convinced and just as homogeneous, a fund run by two Nobel laureates in economics and a former Federal Reserve vice chairman. Nine months after the Nobel medals were handed out, the fund collapsed under about twenty five to one leverage, and the Fed had to organize fourteen banks to put up three point six billion dollars to contain it. Same conviction. Same sameness. One room built Apple. The other needed a bailout.
Neither the scar tissue nor the gung ho helped either room see itself clearly. Caution earned from past failure can mean you have learned something real, or it can mean you are simply too marked to move. A clean record can mean you are early enough that nothing has gone wrong yet, or it can mean you have not been tested at all. Both postures feel completely justified from the inside. Neither tells you anything about the room you are actually sitting in.
None of this proves agentic AI is a bubble or a genuine turn. Two historical examples are not a statistical case, they are a demonstration that conviction alone settles nothing. What actually distinguishes Homebrew from LTCM was never visible on the night itself. It only showed up later, in who outside the room started paying for what was being built.
That is the only test worth running. Not how sure the room feels, caution or conviction alike, but whether anyone outside that room is paying for the idea yet. I left that evening no more certain than I walked in. The room never tells you. Only the people spending money outside it do. If you have sat in a room like that and later found out which kind it was, tell me what told you.
