It’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.

Which 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.

Using "low cost" and LLM's in the same sentence is kind of funny to me.

The 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.

I 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.

> 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.

on some agents you just switch the model and carry on.

Except 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.