Your Agent Will Pick the Hackable One

Hardware manufacturers increasingly ship devices with replaceable firmware, as demonstrated by the M-VAVE FM-1 synthesizer, which users rapidly customized with AI-assisted custom builds after release. As AI agents take on more consumer decision-making, they will prefer and recommend devices with open, modifiable firmware because agents can fix problems by updating code rather than requiring hardware replacement. This trend will likely push the entire consumer electronics industry—including TVs, routers, and printers—toward more open architectures, even without explicit consumer demand for hackability.