my team builds AI infrastructure, so yes, i have a horse in this race. the horse shows up at the end, clearly labeled. the history comes first, and the history is free.
jim barksdale, back when he ran netscape, said the only two ways to make money in software are bundling and unbundling.
people quote it like a joke. it's not a joke. it's the whole industry in one sentence, and it explains exactly what happened to your sprint board.
Jim Barksdale TED Talk - The Power of Networks
the cycle, in 90 seconds
microsoft bundled office. google unbundled it into free web apps. then it bundled them back into workspace.
cable bundled channels. netflix unbundled them. now netflix has ads, tiers, and live sports. that's a cable bundle with a different logo.
craigslist was one bundle. airbnb, zillow, indeed, tinder each took one row. then each of them started bundling again: payments, insurance, messaging, verification.
aws unbundled the data center into 200 services. snowflake and databricks bundled the useful ones back together and got carried by the very clouds they sit on top of.
same shape every time. someone unbundles to win on choice and price. the seams between the pieces start costing more than the pieces. someone bundles so nobody has to touch the seams again. repeat.
the part people miss: in every one of those cycles, there's a stretch in the middle where the user is the one holding the seams. that stretch is miserable and it always ends the same way. somebody does the bundling for you.
AI skipped a step
here's what's weird about AI. it unbundled before it ever bundled.
there was never an office moment. no single integrated product everyone used and then got picked apart. the stack arrived pre-shattered.
a model provider. a second model provider for when the first one is down or expensive. a vector database. an embeddings provider. a memory service. a rag framework. an orchestration layer. observability. a gateway to route between all of it.
that's eight or nine vendors for one app. i've counted this before and it still bothers me. nobody designed it. it accreted, one sprint and one free tier at a time.
every one of those vendors is a great unbundler. best vector database. best memory. best router. each one wins its row.
nobody owns the seams. you do. and the seams are where all the work is.
the seams are where your time goes
be honest about what you spent last quarter on.
not on the agent. on the glue. the retry logic between the gateway and the model. the schema translation between the rag framework and the vector db. the memory that's written in one place and read from another and never quite agrees with itself. state living in three systems with three retention policies.
then a better model ships and you do it all again, because the glue was written for the old one.
this is the unbundled tax. it's the same tax people paid stitching an email client, a calendar, a doc editor, and a file store together before workspace existed. everyone paid it, everyone hated it, and it felt normal because everyone was paying it.
and here's the thing about the tax. it's not your job. nobody hired you to integrate vendors. they hired you to ship the agent. the glue is the work you do instead of the work you were hired for.
you are in the miserable middle
look at any of the cycles above. the middle stretch, where users hold the seams, lasts exactly as long as it takes for someone to bundle it back. then it's over and nobody misses it. nobody is nostalgic for configuring imap.
AI is in that stretch right now. the difference is that this time the stretch has been unusually long, because the parts kept changing under everyone's feet and nobody could sit still long enough to assemble them.
we sat still. that's the horse.
the horse, as promised
we built backboard so you don't have to bundle anything. the bundling is done.
one api, one key: memory (first on the LoCoMo and LongMemEval benchmarks, receipts on github), routing across 17,000+ models, agentic hybrid rag, and stateful threads. not four services with one invoice. one system where memory, retrieval, routing, and state already share state, so there's nothing to translate between them and no glue to write.
the model is a parameter you pass. when a better one ships, you change a string. you don't re-platform.
it runs where you already build. native in backboard studio and in R-CLI, our open-source coding harness (MIT, highest publicly reported score on terminal bench 2.1 at 84.3%, above every published result). same key and same memory from cursor, claude code, or vs code if that's your setup. no migration.
pip install backboard-sdk, one key, and the eight-vendor diagram becomes one box. free tier is $5 in memory credits, no card.
and now the half of the bundle nobody talks about.
backboard is available on AWS marketplace. that sentence is boring until you know what it does for you. it means your company buys the bundled stack through the cloud bill it already pays, with committed AWS spend it already negotiated, deployed inside its own AWS account. no new vendor onboarding. no ninth security review. no six-week procurement thread where you defend a vector database to someone in finance. the same reason snowflake and databricks get carried by the clouds applies here: a bundled stack is easier to buy through the cloud than through a procurement process, and it's easier to get approved because there's one thing to approve.
so both seams are gone. the technical one, where you wrote glue. and the purchasing one, where you wrote justifications. we did both so you can go back to shipping the agent.
the objection
"a bundle is lock-in with better marketing."
fair. it was true for cable and it's true for most suites. two answers.
first, the exit is real. memory is exportable through crud endpoints. routing is model-agnostic. byok means we never hold your provider keys. you can leave, which is the only honest answer to lock-in, and it's why people stay.
second, the compute is never ours. you pay your cloud directly. we don't resell it at a markup, which is where most bundles quietly make their margin and where most bundle resentment comes from.
the whole post in four lines
software alternates between bundling and unbundling, and in the middle the user holds the seams.
AI unbundled before it ever bundled. you're holding the seams. that's why your sprint board is glue.
the re-bundle is done. memory, retrieval, routing, and state behind one key, the model as a parameter.
and it's on the cloud bill you already pay, so the last seam, getting it approved, is gone too.
go get a key at backboard.io and delete some glue this week.
Comment if you want a promo code for some dev credits.
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