What's in the Box?

When an idea takes hold, it’s worth asking who benefits from you believing it. The sentiment lately is that coding agents have made issue tracking obsolete. The story goes like this: issue tracking is dead, and the fastest teams are collapsing everything into a single tool so agents can loop on demand. It’s a clean story, because as an industry, faster is enticing. But it’s also, conveniently, the story that benefits whoever is selling the single tool.

Let’s start with incentives. Who gains from the singular box? Just this week, Salesforce signed a deal to buy Fin for $3.6B and SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor for $60B. Both own their domain and bill for the work that runs through it. That’s the model worth tens of billions: own the workflow, meter the usage, and watch the valuation climb with the volume. So every vendor has the same incentive. Pull more of your process inside the walls, reduce the friction once you’re in, and sell the enclosure as convenience.

With some competitors, there’s nothing left to infer; they’ve told you the goal. One published a diagram of how the future should work. It put itself as the outer box, with every tool and signal flowing inward through its factory and the finished product emerging on the far side. The integrations, the partner ecosystem, and the perceived openness all point in the same direction, which is inward. Add anything you like, as long as it reports back to the center of our box. I’m not here to argue it isn’t a worthy business model. I’m here to ask whose interest it serves.

The speed of AI should give you pause. The specialization runs too deep, and the tools move too fast, for any one application to stay at the frontier across every surface at once. Betting your workflow on a single box is a bet that one vendor can outrun an entire ecosystem of specialists, and stay independent while doing it. Being locked-in lasts a lot longer than any lead does.

The alternative is no box. That’s the premise behind Korey: it runs on top, not at the center. There’s no rip and replace to see what you’re building, recall why you built it, or measure what you ship. You keep the freedom to add and drop the best tools as the landscape changes. The box was always optional. Now it’s a liability.