The Fridge Is a Trap

TradTech opens the fridge and asks what can we make with what we have?

AI-native closes the door and asks what should we make, knowing the ingredients will change before lunch.

Count your team’s Slack messages that link an arXiv paper or model-drop tweet this week.

Zero? You’re trapped. Two to four? Borderline. Five or more? You’re already shopping.

The fridge is seductive: that Salesforce integration your CISO loves, the vendor swearing their “AI module” bolts on in a sprint, the half-baked wrapper you could “just ship.” You stack yesterday’s contracts into next quarter’s roadmap like leftovers lasagna.

Meanwhile the store restocks nightly.  When Anthropic dropped Claude Sonnet 4.5 on September 29, 2025, Poe had it live before lunch and Perplexity followed within hours; most enterprises are still in procurement cycles measured in quarters, not hours.

Write the menu first. Then keep rewriting it.
“Latest marketing asset in your inbox at 7 a.m., review-ready.”
“Agents that self-inject new tools without a Jira ticket.”
“Evals that autoflag regressions before you hit send.”

Now open the fridge. Keep the eggs if they’re still good. When the recipe needs saffron and you only have paprika, go shopping. Don’t serve AI-powered toast for dinner because that’s all you had.

The grocery store never closes. The repo that compresses chat memory 4× (IC-Former) so your agent stops forgetting context at turn 37? Aisle three. The paper showing how to stuff a 100-page PDF into a vision model with 10× fewer tokens (DeepSeek-OCR)? Checkout line.

TradTech budgets for research; AI-native is research with revenue attached. Every breath tastes the sauce, every commit asks did the future move since lunch?

Your product isn’t what you ship.

It’s how fast you learn while the ingredients change under your fingernails.