What does this equation mean?

Each vendor keeps building genuinely strong internal verification — Claude Code’s adversarial-review subagents and Stop-hook gates, Codex’s tiered sandbox with explicit approval triggers, Copilot’s mandatory human review before CI/CD [ 3 , 7 , 9 ] — and within any one tool’s walled garden, $\mu$ genuinely keeps pace with $\lambda$ . What does not travel is trust between gardens: an organization using more than one agentic tool re-verifies from scratch at every seam, and switching vendors means re-earning an audit history from zero. This is the highest-lock-in cell of the four. Review-at-scale becomes real, but it is real per vendor , and comparing two tools’ actual defect or rework rates stays nearly impossible from outside either company, echoing today’s gap in independently reproducible productivity results [ 11 ] .