Comment by lxgr
5 days ago
It feels like the opposite to me. Moving providers with my Linux VM is incredibly annoying, but with these things, I can (so far) literally ask them to create me a tarball with a README.md and hand it to an agent on the new provider and have it do the rest.
Possibly so for now. But do you think the providers are interested in making interoperability easy?
Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible.
Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.
Obviously I don't expect them to intentionally help me move to the competition, but I do wonder whether obscure data formats as a moat are a thing of the past.
Your second point is where I'd imagine the future moats to live: Exclusivity deals with service providers. Things are already in motion with Amazon banning and Shopify explicitly inviting Muse; we'll probably see much more of that.
That is not really how agents work? You can't reliably stop an agent from writing out its context and even if you could that would just make the agent horrible and unusable at performing tasks in general (e.g. delegating to subagents)