Pattern: Agent Configuration Is Being Deliberately Decoupled From the Vendor, and Three Moves This Month Prove It
GitHub Changelog / OpenAI Codex Changelog·high signal
Three independent August developments point the same direction: Agent Plugins 1.0 was co-signed by six competitors (AWS, Anysphere, Microsoft, OpenAI, Vercel, Google) to make skills+MCP bundles portable across clients; OpenAI shipped an importer that pulls your Claude Code, Cowork and Cursor setup into ChatGPT desktop; and AGENTS.md has settled into a cross-tool rules convention. The strategic read is that vendors have concluded the model is the moat and the config is not — so they're racing to make switching free. For builders the practical consequence is that skills, rules files and MCP manifests are now durable assets worth version-controlling independently of whichever agent you're using this quarter.