I wish we had fewer products then.

Broad over-generalization is code for "no article"

This whole post seems like a fallacy.

Some people state that "there is no vendor lock in" as a plus, and then don't have a product.

The author then uses this to make the argument that anyone claiming that has no product.

They say "If OpenAI weren't a model lab they wouldn't really even give the user the option of a model picker. The job is to hand the user the result. They do that no matter which model is selected underneath."

I would absolutely use claude code with other models. And people absolutely like to customize their environment and not get hit with a ton of random system prompts; there is value in the harness not being bad. The author even mentions T3 code.

I think codex/claude code are good harnesses. That doesn't preclude other ones from existing. If it weren't for the crazy subsidization, it would even make sense to use those harnesses on other models.

This author seems to be subjected to AI psychosis and think that AI just "knows" how to do things out of nowhere and prefer to pay for a crystal ball instead of having the actual tools to reproduce the model of use of the various capabilities the LLM offers, complete folly.

> We use them because we want the best model available. We want GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, and Opus 5.5. They're really good models and open-source models are not even close.

I want the best model, but I can't afford the best model.

Cheaper models happen to be good enough, and I can afford them.

Even after reading the post, I'm confused what the author is missing. There are graphs competing cost, but is the author just rich enough that they can afford the top models all the time?

The post is really incoherent. If I'm understanding it correctly, it's trying to say "product" is claude code/cowork/paper/codex/etc, not the model. So building a claude code/cowork/paper/codex/etc clone with a model selector is bad, because you're just cloning a successful product and the model doesn't matter so you don't have a product because (again) it's just a clone.

I think I get what it's trying to say, but there is so much roundabout thinking.

Just say "Focus more on the user experience and trying to distinguish yourself from the frontier lab product you're trying to copy. Your users won't tolerate a clone-with-model-selector for too long"? I think

Agreed with others that this is a fallacy. Companies do raise prices. Being able to move between them without rewriting everything is a huge benefit. We've seen this with cloud, we've seen this with every large platform. Oracle's entire business is making it painful to migrate off them and then jacking up prices. Microsoft, AWS, and everyone else have tried to do the same thing.

The talk about models is also bullshit. Some people I work with have taken to asking what model people used and refusing to even review content from ones they consider lesser. This is absolute insanity.