the real future of the very best vertical products is Model/Harness Choice + Openness easy to deploy infra is nice (great release from Ant) …

the real future of the very best vertical products is Model/Harness Choice + Openness easy to deploy infra is nice (great release from Ant) but it’s not the lever that matters the most at all to build the best agent when building a vertical agent you basically want to pull on every possible product lever to reach the Pareto frontier of Perf/Cost/Latency for your agent I want: - No model lock in, Claude is great but I need to access the best model for my task. If my competitor can have the same arch but access smarter, cheaper, models that I can’t, that’s bad. And the model wars aren’t stopping anytime soon. - Own my data and memory! Production data/evals are the currency of agent self-improvement. I want to be able to move/edit them somewhere else if that will make my agents better. - Finetune open, faster, specialized models on my data. I don’t want frontier intelligence on every task…I just want it on my task for my customers! The on-ramp to that is using your collected data to fine-tune a model for this. You might have to do this multiple times but it will still be cheaper than always routing to a frontier system we’re benefiting from an incredible intelligence battle between the labs and with open models open everything lets you choose when you want to pick a closed model, selfishly optimize for your product and promiscuously try every other choice :) a lot of talk on how 1000 startups just died due to Claude managed agents. I think that’s overblown - the truth is the moat for agentic products has been shifting from infra engineering to domain expertise + data for a while, managed agents is GOOD news if you’re a domain expert …

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Source: Harrison Chase (X) | 2026-04-09