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Series

The Exit Clause

A running series on writing the exit before the renewal. Lock-in in the AI era was never the license fee. It was the cost of understanding your own estate, and that cost just collapsed. Each post draws the target architecture for a platform you have lived with for years, at a different altitude of the stack, and asks how far the exit can honestly reach.

4 parts · 42 min total · Oct 2026

Every serious contract has an exit clause except, somehow, your software platform. These posts fix that, one platform at a time. The thesis is the same at every altitude: the vendor was never charging you for the runtime, it was charging you for your inability to describe your own system, and AI has made that description cheap. What changes from post to post is how far the exit reaches. You can fully re-home a package that rides on a platform. You can only shrink the platform itself. Drawing the line on purpose is the whole discipline.

  1. Part 01 12 min The Exit Clause Your Architecture Is Missing Vendor lock-in is a weaker trap in the AI era than the renewal quote assumes. The leverage was never the platform, it was the cost of understanding your own estate, and that cost just collapsed. A practical path off MuleSoft, and why every renewal needs an exit already written.
  2. Part 02 9 min Leaving nCino Won't Set You Free nCino runs on Salesforce, so the exit does not lead outside. For most banks it leads one floor down, into deeper dependence on the platform you were already renting. There are three doors out of nCino. Only one of them actually sets you free, and it is the one almost nobody takes.
  3. Part 03 9 min Salesforce Is Writing Your Exit Clause A platform confident in its future does not decompose itself into endpoints, give away the data layer, and hand you React. Salesforce is unbundling itself because the human-seat era its footprint was built for is ending. Agents don't log in. The real question is which two layers survive the transition, and whether you own them.
  4. Part 04 12 min Opacity Was the Moat Cryptographers settled it in 1883: a system that depends on secrecy was never secure. The rest of software coasted on opacity anyway, because understanding a system you did not build was expensive. That cost has collapsed, from AI decompilers to spec recovery for legacy code, and with it the last pretense that a black box is a wall. Here is what that breaks, what it exposes, and what survives.
Start with Part 1 →