Spent two days at the AI Agents Conference in NYC. Most of the companies there were betting on the wrong moat.

Reddit practitioner field report from NYC's AI Agents Conference surfaces a structural critique worth tracking: the dominant vendor category, agent observability, governance, and orchestration tooling, may be building on a collapsing moat. The VC metric flagged, ARR per engineer trending upward, implies that as coding labor costs approach zero, middleware layers lose pricing power. The real defensibility argument shifts toward outcome-aligned business models and proprietary domain data, not tooling abstractions. Infrastructure teams and AI-native founders should pressure-test whether their moat survives a world where GPT-wrapper engineering costs drop another 10x.