Stratagems #9: Lena and P Watched Two AI Suppliers Fight. The Logs Said Neither Was Clean.

This is the ninth entry in a series that uses fictional narrative and classical Chinese strategy texts to talk about AI industry dynamics. This installment follows two characters observing two AI vendors degrade in parallel and drawing conclusions about dependency risk. The strategic lesson being illustrated is roughly: do not pick a side when both options are flawed — wait for the landscape to stabilize. For a founder building on top of model APIs, the underlying message is concrete even if the delivery is heavily stylized: multi-vendor AI dependency with no fallback is a liability, and the logs from both suppliers will often reveal neither was actually reliable. Reservation: the framing is a heavy lift for the insight delivered. Readers who want the strategy point without the literary apparatus will find the signal-to-noise ratio low. Worth reading if you follow the series; skippable otherwise. -> Best for: solo founder or AI engineer evaluating multi-provider infrastructure risk