Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user.
Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents.
Coincidentally, I published a note on my blog just about this today https://aditya.rs/blog/2026/09/29/inference-providers-should...
But ultimately the AI company CAN choose to just make all the data exportable and open source their product for self-hosting. (The mainstream ones won't, of course, they want to lock you in and hide their AI prompts and algorithms.)
I think what is sorely needed is a version of Dots/Muse without lock-in risk but is still accessible to regular people unlike Openclaw.
I disagree with this part. AI companies will want to try their damndest to control distribution of AI, so that they can enshittify later.
Consumers conscious of this will want an alternative, of course. Might be niche similar to how Kagi is in search because big tech will always have a AI inference cost advantage + making users the product (extra $ from ads & purchase cuts) + the good old strategy of dumping.
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.
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.
The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.
OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal.
I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I’m doing is tied to that harness.
When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.
So the harness specific setup is just symbolic links to the canonical .md file in various git repos. Also the heavy use of redmine / discourse / GLPI (via small go CLi wrappers that crush and Zcode made for me ) allows me to remain context / chat agnostic as well.
This works for hosted mass-market solutions just as well! ChatGPT and Claude allow me to download all of my data, and these days data formats are less of a moat than ever given that you can just hand them to an LLM and have that worry about importing it into your new thing for you.
I've even seen explicit "offboarding prompts" to hand to your old agent, e.g. in Meta Muse.
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.
Plus there is only so many of them.
And now OpenAI has done the same thing with their fuzzy, friendly, colorful dots.
I am physically sick.
even seeing the linux penguin makes me want to punch my monitor and commit sudoku
The Linux kernel is ultimately a friendly open-source project. There's no harm in it being marketed using a cartoon penguin.
These AI services, meanwhile, are the dangled lights on the heads of data-hungry environment-threatening job-killing leviathantine anglerfish.
Making the dangled light present as non-threatening is not a good thing for society, no matter how much you may personally like pretty lights.
So much more terrifying for a cute, round, fuzzy, friendly, rosy-cheeked plushie trying to exterminate the crew.
Hilarious.
when I tried GPT-5, I was sad mostly because GPT-5 had some added wordiness. fluff, if you will. o3, though, is a black hole you can talk to, and it only gave information back if there was something to give back. that kind of vibe is my dream coworker
Tools like OpenClaw and Pi seem to remove that from the equation, letting you keep your 'history' and customization while using whatever inference provider you want. If Muse takes off, which seems to be built upon or atleast arch'd similar to OpenClaw, I think we'll see the rise of on-device harnesses.
This would further the efforts to "resist all attempts to.... lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.", imo. In a model-agnostic harness all you care about is speed, accuracy, and price.
Not all Nerds are the same. I've been attacked for questioning why some companies still use Oracle, when most of the ones I've worked at either migrated off Oracle or were in the process of doing so.
Lol what? Most of the hackernews gang consider themselves nerds and they lap this shit up! Every new overpriced and unnecessary product that gets released by google, meta, openai, anthropic, whoever, they lap it up!
I also swap all the time for whoever is cheapest
They should try using agents. I hear they can write great software.
Hey, I never asked for it, but Slack Claude (ie. Claude Tag) has actually turned out to be a useful tool for a few things.
Claude Code and Claude Design would like to have a word. Absolute killer products.
If ever the competition reduced it would turn into an absolute shitfest of nonsense very very fast, and that is a prime reason not to allow them to "pace the frontier".
lol. At this point, they're miles behind home-appliance-manufacturer Xiaomi.
(Admittedly Mimo v2.6 is legitimately quite good, and really pushing the frontier in certain respects. For e.g., it's the only music generation model that actually listens to instructions.)
Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.
OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".
I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.
People seemingly ignore how ruinously unprofitable those companies are.
To survive they need to capture different wide population markets. Can't really fault that logic. The whole point of "SI", is general purpose right? So that would imply being used by multiple markets with multiple products.
I get how i prefer an already researched-version of a bug versus a raw bug notice, but I can do this with webhooks in the correct environment.
I really have no idea what to do with my agents over night. I can not build more. I can not think of more problems. My RAM is full.
Today the models are better, but they don't seem trustworthy or reliable enough that I want to give them them a lot of access or freedom. My coding agents sometimes still go off in the wrong direction, or say they did something other than what they did, or say they will do something and then immediately stop without doing anything.
The always-running (so almost never supervised) agent that is meant to do the same work as a person (and therefore needs _access_ like a person) seems like a notorious footgun from earlier this year was just made more powerful, and the companies that are supposed to know the most are telling you to connect it to everything.
Unless Dots is dramatically more capable than Muse, I'm also more bullish on Muse than Dots. I think Muse is a better consumer play because it can be forever subsidized by Meta ads and find distribution in family of apps while Dots is in a weird place between consumer & professional. From the release, it also sounds like you'll have to pay per Dot at some point which doesn't sound appealing.
At least that is what I can ascertain from this article: https://openai.com/index/how-we-build-safety-security-and-pr... (see first diagram when scrolling down)
> A protected workspace for each dot
> Each dot has its own cloud computer, where it can browse, analyze information, create files, and run tools. Dots can keep making progress in these workspaces, even when you are not actively engaged.
> Within each dot’s protected workspace, sandboxing restricts what code and tools that dot can access, helping contain the impact of harmful code or a mistaken command. We also isolate users’ cloud environments from one another and maintain the underlying Linux operating system and Chrome browser
> Each dot’s cloud workspace brings together its computer and the tools it can use. You choose which apps to connect and whether to connect your personal computer. Auto-review checks actions that need review before they run
So it seems like it runs on a Linux container on OpenAI’s cloud infra, but can get access to your local env through ChatGPT’s/Codex on your computer if you give it access
If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the core Dot agent loop does not run in the workspace, but outside it.
Anyways, I'm sure this Dots thing will be clearly distinct from the other projects and won't be deprecated within months
Just look at their SuperBowl/World Cup Ads: Grandmas' talking to ChatGipitee, so cute, so mainstream!
This looks like the new Paperclip helper for a new generation--I guess this is their answer to the (failed?) Jony Ive collab/gizmo, and Muse's cute thingymajib...
The real question to me is: have they lost the coders/terminal bros? And this is their push to stay relevant?
Anyone wondering "why would I use this when I can use (OpenClaw|Hermes|my own computer)" -- these new services are not really meant for you. They're meant for the non-tech savvy and for the next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services
For your casual user, these services will be hard to beat, since they’ll handle all the expensive and hard parts of using computers. No computer purchase necessary, no troubleshooting with tech support, etc. They’re also scalable where you could have not just one agent with one computer at any time, but many
In return, the agent providers would own your compute and data. I can even see them offering this low cost or for free so they can train off of users. Lock in would be insane
For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware
I'm working on an open version that runs agents on your machines and brings a polished UX, and good parallel divide-and-conquer coordination
oh please current generations can't barely use a keyboard
1. Collaboration between always-on agents is a really, really powerful thing. It allows for domain-specific expertise that doesn't overload the context window, while still allowing for access to knowledge if they need it.
2. Domain-specific always on agents creates a good barrier of trust. One of the things I dislike about Claude is sometimes it's memory is all-encompassing. It's weird that it brings up things about my personal life when I'm talking about something related to my business. I've never had that happen with Grok Bot bots because I have one for my biz admin and one for my personal admin. They don't intertwine, which is quite nice.
3. Combined with cloud agents / cloud builds, things become really powerful for development. It was the first time that I felt there was a solution to the git worktrees / multiple streams at once issue. Each bot has its own computer and can spin up additional cloud agents. It comes at the cost of end to end speed - doing something via a grok bot often takes an hour end to end, whereas with a synchronous local prompt it'll take like 10min. The difference is I have to babysit one whereas the other "just works".
On the flip side, since using Grok Bots my inference spend has 2-3x'd. It's worth knowing that tradeoff. Nonetheless I think Luna is a fantastic driver for these, and OAI has very good pricing overall. I'd give these a shot - I think a lot of people would be surprised how helpful they are.
The way I distributed cloud agents for this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032 was via grok bot setting up Fable cloud instances.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001530-getting-started...
The services without the custom avatar now feel like they’re missing something.
As a kid I used to love the video game “Megaman Battle Network”, which depicts a world where everyone walks around with an PDA device carrying a fully customized AI buddy that navigates the internet for them. It was the first time I felt like we were getting close to that.
But even with the nostalgia, I don’t think I can ever connect up a Meta owned agent service to all of my accounts and information.
- non-developer
Just different interfaces on top of the same product (selling tokens)