At first, there were walled gardens

At first, there were walled gardens. It’s the beginning of the internet, every provider like AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc. created a closed ecosystem. You didn’t have "The Internet", you had the closed set of services that your provider made available to you. Mail, chat, news, and content: all only accessible through the provider.

Originally, it was not possible to send an email to someone who had a different internet provider! Imagine, you subscribed to AOL, and your friend subscribed to CompuServe? Nope, no email possible for you buddy…

Even worse, it was only possible to access a subset of all the existing websites. Imagine that nowadays: "Oh you are using XYZ provider? You can’t access YouTube, sorry"

It seems ridiculous thinking about it, now that the web is open and everyone can create content and access anything. It just felt like the right move to allow an open, healthy, open ecosystem.

It’s 2026, and we are entering an age of generative AI. There are two providers who are ahead of everyone (for now): Anthropic and OpenAI. They both share the same characteristics of the past web gatekeepers who eventually fell behind. Everything they do is closed source: tools, models, and harnesses.

For now, the novelty still gives them an edge over everyone else. But the open is catching up. Open-weight models are trailing closely behind. Models are on the way to becoming a commodity. Open-source harnesses are also very popular. DeepSeek Harness, and NousResearch Hermes Agent are both at around 250k stars on GitHub. Pi.dev is at 111k stars.

When will the market realize that an economy thrives under openness? Maybe once the free ride from the venture money that pumps companies is over, and we have to pay the actual bill? Because once we break out of the walled gardens, we will finally realize that it is beautiful out there, we might have never known.