> The worst part about the rollout is that the upgrade to GPT-5 was automatic and didn't include any way to roll back to the old model.

[...]

> If we don't have sovereignty and control over the tools that we rely on the most, we are fundamentally reliant on the mercy of our corporate overlords simply choosing to not break our workflows.

This is why I refuse to use any app that lives on the web. Your new tool may look great and might solve all my problems but if it's not a binary sitting there on my machine then you can break it at any time and for any reason, intentionally or not. And no a copy of your web app sitting in an Electron frame does not count, that's the worst of both worlds.

This week I started hearing that the latest release of Illustrator broke saving files. It's a real app on my computer so I was able to continue my policy of never running the latest release unless I'm explicitly testing the beta release to offer feedback. If it was just a URL I visited then everything I needed to do would be broken.

Paul Graham wrote an influential essay in 2001 arguing that online hosted software was going to be great:

https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

The benefits that he described did come to pass, but the costs to user autonomy are really considerable. Companies cancel services or remove functionality or require updates, and that's it: no workaround and no recourse for users.

The hosted LLM behavior issue is a pretty powerful example of that. Maybe a prior LLM behaved in some way that a user liked or relied on, but then it's just permanently gone!

Yeah, the AI angle doesn't really bring any new element to this conversation that free software advocates have been having for almost half a century now.

Well, I guess AI-as-my-romantic-partner people don't care so much about freedom to inspect the code or freedom to modify, in this instance - just the freedom to execute.