To me one of the big downsides of LLM's seems to be that you are lashing yourself to a rocket that is under someone else's control. If it goes places you don't want, you can't do much about it.

That's true for traffic on Facebook, Apple App store guidelines or Google terminating your account as well. What's new is the speed of change and that it literally affects all users at once.

They could have released Opus 4.6.2 (or whatever) and called it a day. But instead they removed the old way.

3rd party dependency for a business always freaked me out, and now we have to use LLM to keep up with the intensified demand for production speed. And premium LLM APIs are too inconsistent to rely on.