There are no specialized factories for every product in the world. Pillows are wildly different. Every pillow you've ever owned has a different shape, fabric, fill. You could build a robot for any specific pillow. The tech exists. Nobody does it. Why?

A Chinese factory can train sweatshop workers in two weeks on a new pillow design. A dedicated machine costs millions and can't pivot. Human labor wins not on capability. The machines exist. It wins on flexibility per dollar. And the ratio still favors humans by an order of magnitude in most categories.

Agent replacements are the dedicated machine. Their real cost isn't tokens. It's tokens plus the engineer wrapping them, plus orchestration, plus the supervisor, plus the eval pipeline, plus the rebuild every time a model version subtly changes behavior. The team you replaced could pivot in two weeks. The agent stack can't.

Flexibility per dollar is the gap.

This is a good point and imo there is an interesting tension between adaptability and specialization.

Stable environments naturally drive populations towards more specialized actors in niches as they benefit from efficiency. Think of leverage in the financial economy or the dinosaurs.

When a big system disruption inevitably arrives, you better hope you still have some depth around with adaptable general populations that can survive the crisis and occupy the new environment. Think of Minsky moments and the K-Pg event for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Another example would be stem cells vs organs and their specialized cell types.

It seems to me like you need enough regular change to avoid overspecialization and preserve the ability to survive large changes.

A machine can absolutely be reprogrammed and your pillow example fails. Variants are made all the time.

Slopidly slop slop