Intelligence is (hopefully) being commoditized, users can now swap models and barely notice the difference. This has forced AI companies to shift their competitive focus from model performance to the application layer and it’s becoming clear that the winners will be those who give users the best tools to manage AI agents.
Since computing began, industries have followed one of two paths:
User-first: web 1 (emails, domains), traditional software (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) and crypto. Open protocols and low switching costs kept companies honest. Users retained control because moving to a competitor was always an option.
Company-first: Web 2.0, social media, search engines. Network effects are so big that companies only need to play nice long enough to achieve critical mass. Once the network effect kicked in, users became trapped.
AI is shaping up to follow the first model because of a fundamental reason: AI is a tool, not a network.
Your experience with your agent doesn’t depend on everyone else using the same tool. You can use Claude on Monday and Codex on Tuesday without losing anything of value. This eliminates network effects as a viable moat. The only path left for companies to trap users would be the Apple-style data lock-in with a closed ecosystem and painful migration processes. That’s what makes the industry’s adoption of markdown files so important.
Markdown is almost offensively simple: plain text with basic formatting syntax that any human can read and any tool can parse. Text files that have worked since 1980 and will work in 2080.
For AI agents, markdown is emerging as the standard format for context, memory, and instructions. And because markdown is just text, you can copy your entire agent configuration to a competitor in seconds.
This makes lock-in almost impossible. Your entire workflow, agent’s memory and custom preferences are all human-readable text that works everywhere. Companies must compete on quality and innovation every single day, because you’re always one copy-paste away from trying their competitor. As long as markdown stays the standard, we users stay in control.