I hear you on vendor lock-in. Everyone's freaked out about other companies getting the upper-hand with AI in the loop, so there's this charge to use the hell out of it at all costs. Meanwhile, we're quietly picking winners and losers on the service side of all this, and we'll have to live with that outcome for a long time.

At this point, I'm seriously considering what it would take to build a reasonable budget-AI box that's self-hosted. It wouldn't need to blow the doors off of Claude, just get me most of the way there. Maybe even build it out of used and/or last-gen GPUs and a beefy motherboard.

For most people, CC is cheaper tokens for a SOTA model.

What agentic platform would you recommend for those with API access (including other models)?