The incentives are there. I know reddit and HN it seems like lots of people are using models/harnesses from scrappy competitors, but IME at the enterprise level I’m in the extreme minority who is even aware of them. Virtually everybody uses Anthropic and OpenAI tools and models, with Copilot getting some scraps because of its forced inclusion in Microsoft/github ecosystem

There is no question about the benefit when things go right; a wary engineer responsibly guiding agents to build orders of magnitude more than was possible before, and always skeptical and critical of the vendor, knowing the vendors’ incentives.

But that’s not the majority, and the people approving absurd token spend are too far out of the weeds to see what’s happening - people burning 6 figures in tokens and still end up with broken systems that keep them over the weekend, but now they hardly understand what they’re troubleshooting (if at all).

This is a dream scenario for the fat-cat vendors, so there is incentive to have CC/Codex write more code, overly-complex designs. When users get upset, they jump to OpenAI to spite Anthropic, or vice versa, but always getting further locked in to the duopoly