I've spent the last couple of years deploying enterprise AI, and the fear of 'vendor lock-in' is misplaced. The Salesforce playbook doesn't work here because models are stateless APIs and intelligence costs are collapsing (265x in 3 years). The real constraint isn't compute — it's energy. When Microsoft is restarting Three Mile Island and Google is commissioning nuclear reactors, that tells you where the actual bottleneck is. The lock-in risk isn't the model you choose; it's the architectural debt you build around it.
Author here. The key distinction I'm drawing is between sub-agents (ephemeral, spun up per task, no memory) and what I'm calling mesh agents — persistent, with their own accumulated context and boundaries set permanently by the human, not by whatever orchestrator calls them.
Most multi-agent frameworks treat agents as function calls. This is about agents as peers with standing.
The thing I didn't say explicitly in the post: most people's instinct is to connect the agent to everything first and worry about trust later. I did that too. The discomfort was the signal.
Had an email exchange with a solo developer who builds nothing with AI — his app is beautiful. Made me think about where craft behind building software goes, not whether it survives the changes that AI is bringing.
I think there will always be people interested in the craft. Look at photography, there's loads of digital cameras that are technically better than any old 35mm film, but people still to that for the love of the craft.
Some developers will do the same. To each their own.
