191–200 of 495 posts
I'm not convinced raw costs matter: 1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins. 2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples. 3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time. 4. Many formerly open source infrastructure…
I'll agree but from the other direction. AI continues to absorb my job as a senior systems software engineer (c/c++) and after a couple months I've only spent a few hundred dollars using gpt-5.5/5.6 and codex. I have no idea what people are doing to burn so many tokens but for me this is laughably cheap and every day I discover new capabilities. I don't care if costs go up or down, it's so cheap for what I get that I…
I have the same experience. I literally cannot fathom how people burn the number of tokens they claim to.
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Indeed they are all lossy. Not sure how much they contribute to the quality loss in long context though. I got a 700k session with DSV4 Pro (official API), and the model was still coherent and didn't make any tool call error.
That’s a low bar though, and the least I would expect.
I'll agree but from the other direction. AI continues to absorb my job as a senior systems software engineer (c/c++) and after a couple months I've only spent a few hundred dollars using gpt-5.5/5.6 and codex. I have no idea what people are doing to burn so many tokens but for me this is laughably cheap and every day I discover new capabilities. I don't care if costs go up or down, it's so cheap for what I get that I…
I have the same experience. I literally cannot fathom how people burn the number of tokens they claim to.
If you're working on isolated components within a system or small projects, you'll have a very different experience.
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Unlike all your examples, switching out an LLM is both cheap an easy. So easy that every 3 months or so new models are released and people grab them and start using them. The UX is the same regardless the provider. You send in a prompt, it spits back an answer. In all your other cases, the cost to switch is losing support and a difficult transition period. But in the case of LLMs, there was no support to begin with.…
If you're developing on top of LLM APIs directly, this is definitely not true. There are differences in how context caching works, in what's available through native harnesses, the types of tools you're fine-tuned on (GPT uses apply_patch while Claude uses edit, with different formats), the API surface (Agents SDK, Responses API, Managed Agents), cost structures, and best-practice guidance all around. Not to mention…
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Exactly, as in, really, will they? Where and at what price, especially across an actual enterprise that needs to deploy them to lots of devs? There's much more than just the actual model. Of course my numbers are a sample of one and I am not spending a lot of money or time on it. Just lazily trying things on my "happen to have this" hardware. But basically trying out the Claude Code I'm used to from work but locally…
4.7 Flash is a small model that's almost a year old, which is ancient. And yes, your dinky GPU will not run anything worthwhile. Just spend $5 on OpenCode Go and give GLM 5.2 a shot if you have the time. It's not quite as good as Opus, but it's more than good enough for many tasks.
$5 the first month, then price is doubled.
> the least understood upcoming shift in AI economics. Then proceeds to talk about something in the AI news every day. Hey, did you guys hear? Open source models are cheaper and their quality is increasing! So, first, by no measure is GLM5.2 as good as Opus. Second, yes, open source models will put pressure on margins...eventually. Everyone knows that. But do you think today's AI business model is the same as tomorro…
GLM-5.2 is not as good as Opus, it's better. I can abliterate GLM-5.2 and have it work on projects that Opus refuses.
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4.7 Flash is a small model that's almost a year old, which is ancient. And yes, your dinky GPU will not run anything worthwhile. Just spend $5 on OpenCode Go and give GLM 5.2 a shot if you have the time. It's not quite as good as Opus, but it's more than good enough for many tasks.
> Just spend $5 on OpenCode Go $5 the first month , then price is doubled.
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A lot of those things you mentioned have sticking power because they’re familiar to folks and migrating to something else is a big deal. I can’t imagine most people would be able to tell the difference between Sonnet and GLM 5.2. If the infrastructure around the model you’re using doesn’t change, then swapping models is extremely easy.
I'm using pi-coder with just the free-tier models I can get on openrouter / opencode / kilocode. When I run out of quota on one model I often switch to another model in the same session , and it generally works just fine.