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The great thing about LLMs being more or less commoditized is switching is so easy. I use Claude Code via the VS Code extension. When I got a couple of 500 err
by davedx 8mo ago
The great thing about LLMs being more or less commoditized is switching is so easy.
I use Claude Code via the VS Code extension. When I got a couple of 500 errors just now I simply copy pasted my last instructions into Codex and kept going.
It's pretty rare that switching costs are THAT low in technology!
- shermantanktop 8mo agoIt’s not a moat, it’s a tiny groove on the sidewalk. I’ve experienced the same. Even guide markdown files that work well for one model or vendor will work reasonably well for the other.
- skydhash 8mo ago> It's pretty rare that switching costs are THAT low in technology! Look harder. Swapping usb devices (mouse,…) takes even less time. Switching wifi is also easy. Switching browser works the same. I can equally use vim/emacs/vscode/sublime/… for programming.
- NicuCalcea 8mo agoMost people only have one mouse or Wi-Fi network. If my Wi-Fi goes down, my only other option is to use a mobile hotspot, which is inferior in almost every way.
- oneeyedpigeon 8mo ago> Most people only have one mouse Tell me you're not a Mac user without telling me you're not a Mac user...
- crazygringo 8mo agoHuh?
- oneeyedpigeon 8mo agoThe default Apple mouse needs a backup because it still cannot be charged and used at the same time.
- NicuCalcea 8mo agoThankfully, not a Mac user, or even a wireless mouse user.
- pchristensen 8mo agoSwitching between vim <-> emacs <-> IDEs is way harder than swapping a USB (unless you already know how to use them).
- ahmadyan 8mo agogood point, they are standards, by definition society forced vendors to behave and play nice together. LLMs are not standards yet, and it is just pure bliss that english works fine across different LLMs for now. Some labs are trying to push their own format and stop it. Specially around reasoning traces, e.g. codex removing reasoning traces between calls and gemini requiring reasoning history. So don't take this for granted.
- crazygringo 8mo agoI dunno. Text is a pretty good de facto standard. And they work in lots of languages, not just English.
- whatever1 8mo agoI mean sublime died overnight when vscode showed up.
- amelius 8mo agoYou make it sound like lock-in doesn't exist. But your examples are cherry picked. And they're all standards anyway, their _purpose_ was for easy switching between implementations.
- jononor 8mo agoYou would have to buy said USB device and get it to your location. Switching WiFi is only easy if you mean on a single machine/gateway. Swapping the WiFi network equipment in an office is considerably more involved, depending on the desired configuration.
- davedx 8mo agoHuh? I have the VSCode extensions for both. Switching is a couple of mouse clicks and copy paste.
- paxys 8mo agoWhich is exactly why these companies are now all focused on building products rather than (or alongside) improving their base models. Claude Code, Cowork, Gemini CLI/Antigravity, Codex - all proprietary and don't allow model swapping (or do with heavy restrictions). As models get more and more commoditized the idea is to enforce lock-in at the app level instead.
- alecco 8mo agoFWIW, OpenAI Codex is open source and they help other open source projects like OpenCode to integrate their accounts (not just expensive API), unlike Anthropic who blocked it last month and force people to use their closed source CLI.
- bloppe 8mo agoI only integrate with models via MCP. I highly encourage everybody to do the same to preserve the commodity status
- LetsGetTechnicl 8mo agoUsing "low cost" and LLM's in the same sentence is kind of funny to me.
- harrisi 8mo agoI genuinely don't know how any of these companies can make extreme profit for this reason. If a company makes a significantly better model, shouldn't it be able to explain how it's better to any competitor? Google succeeded because it understood the web better than its competitors. I don't see how any of the players in this space could be so much better that they could take over the market. It seems like these companies will create commodities, which can be profitable, but also incredibly risky for early investors and don't make the profits that would be necessary to justify the evaluations of today.
- crazygringo 8mo ago> If a company makes a significantly better model, shouldn't it be able to explain how it's better to any competitor? No. Not if it's not trained on any materials that reveal the secret sauce on why it's better. LLM's don't possess introspection into their own training process or architecture.
- harrisi 8mo agoThat's my point. Anything that could exist that's significantly "better" would be able to share more about its creation. And anything that could be significantly better would have to be capable of "understanding" things it wasn't trained on.
- crazygringo 8mo agoThat's not true. There are a million ways to be "significantly better" that don't involve knowledge about the model's creation. It can be 10x or 100x or 1000x more accurate at coding, for example, without knowing a single thing more about its own internal training methodology.
- Smaug123 8mo agoCould you share anything about your creation, without having been to school where we taught you what the answers were? Can you deduce the existence of your hippocampus just by thinking really hard?
- bgirard 8mo agoThe switching cost is so low that I find it's easier and better value to have two $20/mo subscription from different providers than a $200/mo subscription with the frontier model of the month. Reliability and model diversity are a bonus.
- davedx 8mo agoYes that's exactly what I have too.
- falloutx 8mo agoon some agents you just switch the model and carry on.
- benterix 8mo agoExcept Kimi Agent via website is hard to replace - I tried the same task in Claude Code, Codex, and Kimi Agent - the results for office tasks are incomparable. The versions from Anthropic and OpenAI are far behind.