The Convergence Tax

What this article does: Argues that the simultaneous convergence of major AI labs on identical agent primitives in July 2026 is evidence of structural realism — the interfaces are revealing the shape of the problem, not the preferences of the designers. On July 16, 2026, three of the largest AI labs in the world shipped major updates to their coding agent products. OpenAI released gpt-5.5-pro and…