When Software Becomes the Business
As agents absorb more operating work, a firm's ability to own and move its encoded processes becomes a condition of business control.
Developed from a conversation between Pete Winn, Andy David and Jarrad Grigg
A business increasingly looks like a layer of people overseeing custom software that carries the work beneath them. Agents can make decisions, move tasks forward, transform information and flag material for review. In that structure, software is no longer merely a tool used by the business. The software, data, alerts and processes together become a working definition of the business.
Where that operating layer is built determines who can ultimately control it. If every process lives inside a single provider such as Claude, leaving becomes difficult because the firm’s accumulated workflows cannot be transferred quickly. A provider can change its models, pricing or access while the customer bears the switching cost. Convenience at the start can therefore become dependence once the software is carrying essential work.
The alternative is to keep the encoded operation separate from the intelligence that runs it. Pete described abstracting Wingman’s skills and hooks so the same instructions can work across Claude Code, Codex and Gemini, allowing models and agent harnesses to be swapped. The durable asset is not a particular model. It is the firm’s own collection of processes, preferences and knowledge, retained in portable code and text files that the firm controls.