Building Agents Is Trivial Now, Context Is the Next Frontier — Jeff Ng, Unblocked
Agent infrastructure is now commoditized by cloud platforms, making context the new competitive frontier
“They're all taxes one has to pay in order to get an agent out there to play the game.”
Unblocked founding engineer Jeff Ng argues that building production agents — once a quarter-long team effort requiring custom solutions for state persistence, sandboxing, and observability — has been largely solved by cloud infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, Vercel, and AWS. These were never capabilities improvements, just mandatory infrastructure taxes. With that layer commoditized, the talk positions context as the remaining hard problem preventing agents from being reliably correct.