It's common knowledge at this point but worth repeating to have some context for future readers, given how fast things have been evolving: over the past year pretty much all software based companies have been in a hurry developing and integrating agentic workflows into all facets of their business, and in general delegating more and more of the work, decision making, analysis to LLMs. Even calling it a hurry doesn't feel strong enough, more of a fanatic push towards making everything agentic, with such a momentum that nothing can stop it. Of course most companies rely on AI vendors; running your own inference infrastructure is pretty expensive, requires specialized knowledge and workers.
Thinking about it as systems we are introducing a unique external dependency to pretty much all aspects of a business's internal and external processes, with very little time to consider potential consequences.
An HN comment I made 2 weeks ago on that topic that touches the core issue I personally see:
The cost is a problem, but IMHO more important is delegating so much of your internal knowledge, thinking, and systems to a 3rd party.
We are very close to the point where if Claude and ChatGPT APIs are down, companies cannot function. How is that introduced so quickly into so many critical places without taking that specific fact in consideration? What is the plan for all those companies whose workflows now depend heavily on a remote LLM whenever the services get cut? What if your company account gets banned?
In some ways it is worth than depending on a company for hosting, because even your debugging tools are based on AI. MCP is great to go through datadog, sentry, until your agent or the MCP server are down and you don't know how to look for the issue yourself because you do not actually understand how your systems work.
I have had this in the back of my mind since end of last year, and I don't see that point taken seriously enough. Companies are willingly morphing into shells built around AI vendors, and by doing so are taking a huge amount of risk. The topic of external dependencies is always a bit frustrating to discuss, it's something so simple to dismiss by pointing that you already have some so why start to question now. But think about it this way: if your company is based on shopify and the platform is down, that's bad, however you still have your support system, you can still do some business, maybe even manage part of the inventory on your end, and handle the crisis (hopefully). If you made your company agentic and the Claude API is down, what can you do? Assuming you went all-in your agentic support system is now broken, your security tooling is broken, your agentic debugging agents are broken, your developers cannot work. In a sane professional context those risks should be discussed and considered before a move to being agentic. But nobody seems to have the time for this it seems.
And to add to this, let's be a bit more extreme and consider that AI models come with their own geopolitical risk. Let's say, what if the country where all the major AI labs are located decides overnight (CET) to fully ban a model worldwide? Well, not a hypothetical this time. Now that the precedent has been set for a specific model, if you're an agentic company and are serious about your business you must be prepared for the time when your access to the AI vendor is fully blocked. Do you still have the knowledge and workers internally to maintain your systems without LLMs? It's really not a given if your engineers have been delegating most of their work to claude code, codex, gemini for a while.
All of that is built on such fragile sand, it doesn't have to be that way. You don't need everything to be agentic right away. You can take the time to analyze, test, understand the cost and risks, then, and only then, decide where that's worth it and where it isn't. The idea that AI has to be embraced right now, everywhere or you will be left behind is both idiotic and cancerous, and should be dismissed with the same smug you would have for a bitcoin evangelist telling you to stay poor with your fiat.