This external article argues that the next generation of platform lock-in will not only live in SaaS data silos. It will live inside the cognitive architecture of businesses that depend too heavily on one model provider’s state, tools, memory, and evaluation surface.
The core frame is that agentic systems need strategic degrees of freedom: model routing, owned context, independent tool execution, and portable evaluation. A single-vendor stack can be a pragmatic v1, but it should not become a one-way door.
The article uses the Unix philosophy as the constructive alternative: small, composable components with explicit interfaces and the right to rewire the system when the market, model landscape, or operational risk changes.