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Comment by rlupi | Hacker News Reader

Single point of failure, single vendor.

All the CEOs are dreaming of getting rid of workers, but I wonder how many of them think clearly about what they are getting. Depending on a single, or few vendors for full-AI employees is the concrete equivalent of unionizing their workforce. If the vendor decides on a price hike (think about the recent history of VMWare), or their full-AI employee gets dumber or lazier (Claude Code taught us a good lesson here just lately), then your whole AI-powered company is at risk. Our current human-based organizations are much more resilient to single point of failures.

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Hm. What if it’s a startup that has just a couple of people and really needs more operational capability even though can’t hire that many people?

From what you said, you won’t accept such a product if it isn’t open source? Or at least, where you can choose the models and pay per use or something similar to that.

My guess is that big, powerful companies won’t use a pay-per-use Devin-like service because they just have so much people they can delegate tasks on that also use Cursor or the like; and startup companies that really need the product’d prefer a fixed rate like Cursor does.

Maybe they’ll actually use specialized agents for multiple tasks, but will also try to build their own solutions or sue frameworks rather than hire another company (like big companies that use Crew AI because it’s open source).

And are you ok with the quality that those full-fledged AI agents (like Devin) deliver? Do you have more pains that the single vendor dilemma?

I am generally very AI-positive. I would accept such a product, if the second best alternative is close enough that I can substitute it in case of emergency.

The question I was replying to is very specific: "Imagine an AI agent that’s indistinguishable from a remote worker, something like Devin but for anything and whose medium of contact are email, Slack, phone calls, etc. What are the BIGGEST Problems you'd face with a full-AI employee?"

My answer: I think the major biggest problem is vendor lock-in, because such a solution would be too juicy to resist.

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