20VC: Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value | The Future of the Inference Market | Why Founders Should Take Discounts for Tier 1 Firms with Harrison Chase, LangChain

Harrison Chase argues lasting agent value accrues to domain-specific harnesses and evals, not models or routing gateways, which remain commoditizing.

• Agent-building stays hard: Harrison Chase says the fundamental difficulty is LLM non-determinism cascading across multi-step agent loops, not just model quality.
• Harness, not gateway, for routing: Chase argues model routing belongs in the harness layer (not gateways like OpenRouter) for vertical/domain agents because it needs state awareness; horizontal tasks like coding could stay in the gateway.

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