> It's pretty rare that switching costs are THAT low in technology!

Look harder. Swapping usb devices (mouse,…) takes even less time. Switching wifi is also easy. Switching browser works the same. I can equally use vim/emacs/vscode/sublime/… for programming.

Switching between vim <-> emacs <-> IDEs is way harder than swapping a USB (unless you already know how to use them).

good point, they are standards, by definition society forced vendors to behave and play nice together. LLMs are not standards yet, and it is just pure bliss that english works fine across different LLMs for now. Some labs are trying to push their own format and stop it. Specially around reasoning traces, e.g. codex removing reasoning traces between calls and gemini requiring reasoning history. So don't take this for granted.

You would have to buy said USB device and get it to your location. Switching WiFi is only easy if you mean on a single machine/gateway. Swapping the WiFi network equipment in an office is considerably more involved, depending on the desired configuration.

You make it sound like lock-in doesn't exist. But your examples are cherry picked. And they're all standards anyway, their _purpose_ was for easy switching between implementations.

Most people only have one mouse or Wi-Fi network. If my Wi-Fi goes down, my only other option is to use a mobile hotspot, which is inferior in almost every way.

Huh? I have the VSCode extensions for both. Switching is a couple of mouse clicks and copy paste.

I mean sublime died overnight when vscode showed up.