MESSAGE FROM BACKBOARD.IO Co-Founder Rob Imbeault:

Coding agents got boring the moment we built a really good one.

That sounds dismissive. I’m ok with that.

Cursor is worth tens of billions. Coding agents are attracting enormous amounts of capital. The category is clearly valuable.

But building R-CLI changed how I think about where the value actually sits.

We built one of the best coding harnesses in the world in a matter of months. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, it performs at the frontier.

Then we open sourced the entire thing.

Not because it wasn't valuable.

Because building it convinced us that the value is moving somewhere else.

Frontier agent performance is becoming accessible much faster than I expected. Small teams can now build systems that compete with products coming out of organizations with vastly more capital, people and compute.

That should make anyone building in this space ask an uncomfortable question:

If a small team can build a frontier coding agent in a few months, how durable is the agent itself as a technical moat?

I don't think the answer is very.

There will still be enormous companies built around coding agents.
Distribution is hard. Product is hard. Workflow ownership is hard.
Brand is hard. Building a great company is very hard.

But the agent?

Increasingly, I think that's becoming the easy part.

The problems that still feel genuinely hard are underneath it.

Making models dramatically cheaper to run.

Giving them persistent organizational context.

Improving them with proprietary data.

Running them privately, locally and securely.

Making open models perform closer to frontier models.

Controlling how intelligence moves across an organization.

Those are the problems we want to work on.

We didn't build R-CLI because we want to win the coding agent market.

We built it and accidentally discovered why we don't.

So rather than build the 1,001st proprietary coding agent and protect the harness like it is the moat, we open sourced ours.

Because our bet is that the next great AI infrastructure companies will not own one agent.

They will make thousands of agents better.

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