I generally think the frontier model labs are doomed as businesses. There's just no economic case for them, especially when a few months later open source models catch up.

Yup. It's not trivial now to setup a system where you can get a frontier model to help do the research, draft a spec, humans read and comment on the spec, and then you get an open model to do the grunt work.

If the spec is very detailed, you've solved most of the problems you might encounter with open models.

You can then get a frontier model to then do a review against the spec.

Doing this cuts down frontier usage by a lot, as all the real work is local, tool calls are instant . It just feels nicer.

I think this is why you're seeing frontier models like Claude suddenly ban people using opencode/pi etc with a subscription (API users still good).