That knowledge comes from the people doing the work. A maintainer remembers which customer still needs an old API, just as a security engineer explains why a change needs a second reviewer. When a team settles a question in an agent session, the answer belongs in the project’s record so the next person can find it. Even more importantly for the frontier labs, the next agent should be able to find it, too.

Neutrality is a way to compete

This is clearly where the frontier labs are moving, even though they’ve all benefited from an industry that provided neutral spaces to build. For example, OpenAI developed Pando, a Git back end for its own monorepo, to handle more engineers and agents reading and writing code concurrently. Its engineers kept using Git. OpenAI retained compatibility with the protocol and client and contributed improvements upstream. That compatibility let it rebuild the back end around the way its engineers already worked.

That industry standardization helps more than any particular lab. A neutral place to build lets an outside contributor using Codex send a patch to maintainers who use Claude. They can discuss it using the project’s tools and run it through the same checks as any other patch. Inside a company, teams that prefer different agents still have to maintain one system together. If only one agent can use the project’s most useful history, its supplier gets a head start from decisions its own customer made.