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Comment by LoganDark

2 days ago

> There's no lockin that Anthropic has because it's trivial for people to switch to a different provider.

This is like saying there's no lock-in that iPhone has because it's trivial to switch to Android. Or that there's no lock-in that Windows has because it's trivial to switch to Linux or Mac. Or that there's no lock-in that cars have because it's trivial to switch to bikes or trains.

They're different products. They're not the same. Being able to write the same code does not make a model Claude. Nor does being able to reach the same benchmark scores. Nor does performing one or a choice set of tasks to a comparable level of quality.

It's true, people can switch if all they want is to perform X, Y, or Z, and some other model can do X, Y and Z well enough. People switch from iPhone to Android all the time. From Windows to Linux or Mac. From cars to bikes or trains or other transit. But they're not the same thing! Android doesn't have a missing business model just because iPhone exists, nor vice versa.

You can't just say that makes cars the same as bikes or Windows the same as Linux. You can't get Claude from anybody other than Anthropic. Maybe you can get something else that does as well where it counts, but not Claude. You can't just say Anthropic is just the same as any open model provider, and that you can just switch providers for the same result. The open model has to actually deliver the desired result, because you're not going to find one that is just Claude.

This is what keeps me on Apple now. This is why most of my biggest hopes and dreams for my personal computing are that Apple will do the right things and in the right way. Because if I want to reject even one single aspect of an Apple product, it means changing to an entirely separate product. That gives up every aspect Apple had over that product at once, even the vastly positive ones. So I put up with the decisions I don't agree with, in exchange for the decisions that I do.

(Meanwhile, I plan to switch to SteamOS as soon as they support Nvidia. I don't use or care about any aspects of Windows besides running games. Now that I have Steam Frame, I don't need Windows Mixed Reality either.)

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LoganDark

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dofm  1 day ago

It seems way, way easier to switch LLMs than it is to even change from one iPhone to another iPhone!

Granted Anthropic (and Google, maybe less OpenAI actually) do what they can to make it similar. But switching phone brands would take me a day or two of planning and I don’t even use the Apple mail app.

slopinthebag  2 days ago

fwiw im pretty locked into apple but regularly switch both models and harnesses, using whatever has the best cost/perf ratio.

  • LoganDark  2 days ago

    It varies by individual; most people have both some products they won't switch out and some products they will. It all depends on what they get out of each product and what they'd get out (or not get out) of switching. Some products have characteristics I care about that nothing else replicates. Some products are slotted in and out all the time just to achieve a certain goal. Sometimes I'm searching new products for a characteristic I haven't seen yet.

    I don't switch from Claude for things like emotional advice. I gave Siri AI a big trial run when it first launched, because I absolutely love the system integration and the user interface, but the model itself is a bit dry for my needs. It doesn't really have principles the way Claude does (thanks to "constitutional AI" or whatever the fuck they want to call it). And I want principles, and sometimes the impression of empathy. Claude meets that bar without being obsessively sycophantic or paranoid.

    (Siri AI is very good for some things, though. And I do greatly admire it. When it first came out, I even hacked up an adapter to use it for coding with Pi for just a short time, partly as a meme but also just out of curiosity.)

    I tried switching from Claude Code to Pi with DeepSeek. I had tried OpenCode at first, but it's just complete garbage. I felt so impressed with it at first, it felt so slick on the outside, but that impression's just been shattered and shattered and shattered ever since I dug into it trying to fix a performance issue. Its data model and internal behavior is just not acceptable for me. (I tried Reasonix for about five minutes before concluding it's also a bit slop. It seems crafted by someone who actually understands LLMs though, unlike OpenCode, but it's still not very good.)

    I absolutely loved the flexibility of Pi and the cheap prices of DeepSeek, but found myself falling into the same patterns as when trying Linux: I was constantly debugging the harness and the model, trying to get it to perform better or investigate something or other. Constantly worried that something was going wrong, that I should try to fix. And yeah, Pi has a lot of convenient features that Claude Code doesn't have, is a lot lighter, and of course can be incredibly modded. I just felt like it was also my responsibility to make my own experience, not just my capability.

    At this point, Claude Code seems to just work for me, even though they removed a bunch of features I loved a while ago and never added them back (they came up with huge misunderstandings that completely missed what I actually appreciated about those features, and then proceeded to file them away as resolved). I never have to worry about debugging Claude or Claude Code.

    For certain other things that aren't chatting or coding, I found that Gemini 4 Argon is actually by far the best model I've ever seen. It is the first model that's ever strictly exceeded the original November 2022 release of ChatGPT for me. Yup, it took the collective world nearly four years to replicate an experience from 2022. Gemini 3.1 Pro was so close though, I could feel it. When I first found it, I was so relieved that type of experience wasn't lost forever. Then Gemini 4 truly solidified what line of models I prefer for that use case.