alt Hacker NewsThis is what worries me. People become dependent on these GenAI products that are proprietary, not transparant, and need a subscription. People build on it like it is a solid foundation. But all of a sudden the owner just pulls the foundation from under your building.
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Luckily local AI is becoming more feasible every day.
At least some of the investors in this tech are hoping for a monopoly position. They'd like to outspend the competition to get an insurmountable lead, at which point they can set their price.
But, so far, competition remains fierce. Anthropic still has the best tools for writing code. That lead is smaller than it's ever been, though. But, honestly, Opus 4.5 is when it got Good Enough. If Anthropic suddenly increased prices beyond what I'm willing to pay, any model that gives me Opus 4.5 or better performance is good enough for the vast majority of the work I do with agents. And, there are a bunch of models at that level, now maybe including some discount Chinese models. Certainly Gemini Pro 3.1 is on par with Opus 4.5. Current Codex is better than Opus 4.5 and close to Opus 4.7 (though I won't use OpenAI because I don't trust them to be the dominant player in AI).
I often switch agents/models on the same project because I like tinkering with self-hosted and I like to keep an eye on the most efficient way to work...which models wastes less of my time on silly stuff. Switching is literally nothing; I run `gemini` or `copilot` or `hermes` instead of `claude`. There's simply no deep dependency on a specific model or agent. They're all trying to find ways to make unique features for people to build a dependence on, of course, but the top models are all so fucking smart you can just tell them to do whatever thing it is that you need done. That feature could probably be a skill, whatever it is, and the model can probably write the skill. Or, even better, it could be actual software, also written by the model, rather than a set of instructions for the model to interpret based on the current random seed.
Currently, the only consistent moat is making the best model. Anthropic makes the best model and tools for coding, but that's a pretty shallow moat...I could live with several other models for coding. I'll gladly pay a premium for the best model and tools for coding, but I also won't be devastated if I suddenly don't have Claude Code tomorrow. Even open models I can host myself are getting very close to Good Enough.
True. That is why it is key important to have open source and sovereign models that will be accessible to all and always on / local.
Competition (OpenAI vs Anthropic is fun to watch) and open source will get us there soon I think.
The owner rug-pulls, or Broadcom buys the owner and starts squeezing.
For the sake of argument if you build on AWS is that any more of a solid foundation? You're beholden to Amazon, unless you have the bandwidth to be able to DR immediately to another provider.
“In the future there might be the possibility that catastrophic event A could happen.”
Not the best argument.
Also there is nothing without dependencies. Loose coupling means coupling.
Anthropic sells due to unrelenting pressure and unachievable demand > new owner cuts costs > models become worse > new owner sells > the capitalistic cycle wins > we, the people, suffer
The sooner you cancel the sooner you become independent of them
Some people are so dependent on it they can't even say it without twisting words to hide the fact that they're now stuck at zero
This is why, despite enjoying all of this, I really want to focus on locally hosted models. If we don't host the technology ourselves, we're setting ourselves up for a hard fall down the line.
Until very recently, local models been little more than brittle toys in my experience, if you're trying to use them for coding.
But lately I've been running Pi (minimal coding agent harness) with Gemma4 and Qwen3.6 and I've been blown away by how capable and fast they are compared to other models of their size. (I'm using the biggest that can fit into 24gb, not the smaller ones.) In fact, I don't really need to reach for Claude and friends much of the time (for my use cases at least).
Imagine if anthropic and openai went bankrupt in the next 2 years. If you look at their financials its a real possibility.
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But these products are all drop in replacements for each other. I've recently favored Codex more than CC, just because rate limits got mildly annoying. I really didn't have to change anything about my workflow in doing that.