This is a similar sentiment I heard early on in the cloud adoption fever, many companies hedged by being “multi cloud” which ended up mostly being abandoned due to hostile patterns by cloud providers, and a lot of cost. Ultimately it didn’t really end up mattering and the most dire predictions of vendor lock in abuse didn’t really happen as feared (I know people will disagree with this, but specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap. note I have never and will never use azure, so I could be wrong on that particular one).

I see people making similar conclusions about various LLM providers. I suspect in the end it’ll shake out about the same way, the providers will become practically inoperable with each other either due to inconvenience, cost, or whatever. So I’ve not wasted much of my time thinking about it.

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michaeldwan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I credit containerization, k8s, and terraform for preventing vendor lock in. Compute like EC2 or GCE are effectively interoperable. Ditto for managed services for k8s or Postgres. The new products Anthropic is shipping is more like Lambda. Vendor kool-aid lots of people will buy into.

What grinds my gears is how Anthropic is actively avoiding standards. Like being the only harness that doesn't read AGENTS.md. I work on AI infra and use different models all the time, Opus is really good, but the competition is very close. There's just enough friction to testing those out though, and that's the point.

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JohnMakin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think there is lock-in, despite those things - for containerization, you're still a lot of the times beholden to the particular runtime that provider prefers, and whatever weird quirks exist there. Migrating can have some surprises. K8s, usually you will go managed there, and while they provide the same functionality, AKS != EKS != GKE at all, at least in terms of managing them and how they plug into everything else. In terraform, migrating from AWS provider to GCP provider will hold a lot of surprises for you for what looks like it should be the exact same thing.

My point was, I don't think it mattered much, and it feels like an ok comparison - cloud offerings are mostly the exact same things, at least at their core, but the ecosystem around them is the moat, and how expensive it is to migrate off of them. I would not be surprised at all if frontier AI model providers go much the same way. I'm pretty much there already with how much I prefer claude code CLI, even if half the time I'm using it as a harness for OpenAI calls.

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fragmede 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a tiny amount of friction. Enough that I'll be honest and say that I spend the majority of my time with one vendor's system, but compared the to the fiction of moving from one cloud to another, eg AWS to GCP, the friction between opening Claude code vs codex is basically zero. Have an active subscription and have Claude.md say "read Agents.md".

Claude Code routines sounds useful, but at the same time, under AI-codepocalypse, my guess is it would take an afternoon to have codex reimplement it using some existing freemium SaaS Cron platform, assuming I didn't want to roll my own (because of the maintenance overhead vs paying someone else to deal with that).

	▲	michaeldwan 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		you're spot on. I use both Claude Code + OpenCode with many different models and friction is minimal as long as I'm deliberate about it. Hell, even symlinking AGENTS.md to CLAUDE.md is like 80% there. It's just portability v convenience. But unlike ~15 years ago with cloud compute, it _feels_ like more people are skeptical of convenience, which is interesting.

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chickensong 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap

I guess I'm one of the people who disagree, specifically about AWS. I think a lot of companies just watch their bill go up because they don't have the appetite to unwind their previous decision to go all-in on AWS.

Ignoring egress fees, migrating storage and compute isn't hard, it's all the auxiliary stuff that's locked in, the IAM, Cognito, CloudFormation, EventBridge, etc... Good luck digging out of that hole. That's not to say that AWS doesn't work well, but unless you have a light footprint and avoided most of their extra services, the lock-in feels pretty real.

That's what it feels like Anthropic is doing here. You could have a cron job under your control, or you could outsource that to a Claude Routine. At some point the outsourced provider has so many hooks into your operations that it's too painful to extract yourself, so you just keep the status quo, even if there's pain.

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JohnMakin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

the AWS things you mentioned you don’t need to mess with at all, with the exception of IAM, which doesn’t cost anything at all.

your experience just hasn’t been my experience I guess. The more managed the service you use, the more costs you are going to pay - for a very long time I’ve got by with paying for compute, network, and storage on the barebones services. If you want to pay for convenience you will pay for it.

One area that was a little shitty that has changed a lot is egress costs, but we mostly have shifted to engineering around it. I’ve never minded all that much, and AWS support is so good at enterprise tiers that they’ll literally help you do it.

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chickensong an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We're talking about add-on services, and you were comparing to cloud providers and implying it doesn't really matter because vendor lock-in didn't really happen as feared. I made the case that it's the add-on services that create the lock-in.

> I’ve got by with paying for compute, network, and storage on the barebones services.

Yes, as I mentioned, that type of migration isn't difficult, which is akin to migrating to a different model provider, but that's not what we're discussing. You can't hand wave the issue away if you're not even talking about the the topic at hand.

That said, I agree with your suspicions of how it'll shake out in the end, because most businesses behave the same way, and always try and lock-in their customers.

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AshamedBadger56 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> the AWS things you mentioned you don’t need to mess with at all

not the op, but I suspect they were meaning it's a huge pain migrating to a different cloud provider when all those features mentioned are in use. not that managing them is a mess in AWS.

	▲	chickensong an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Correct.

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ElFitz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am curious, what do people use Cognito for? I’ve never not ended up regretting using it.

	▲	fragmede an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Cognito is AWS's customer's customer's user login system, so I, as a SaaS company, would use it so my users can log in to my platform. They charge per-user, so if my platform is going to have millions of users, choosing Cognito is a bad idea that will eat all my money. However if I only expect to have a handful of (lucrative) users, it's not the worst idea. The other reason to use Cognito is that AWS handles all the user login issues, and costs very few lines of code to use on my end. The fatal security issue is getting hacked, either the platform as a whole, eg S3 bucket with bad perms or user login getting leaked and reused. While obviously no system is unhackable, the gamble is if a homegrown system is more impervious than Cognito (or someone else's eg Supabase). With a large development team where the login system and overall system security isn't going to be an afterthought, I wouldn't think about using Cognito, but where both of those things are an afterthought, I'd at least consider Cognito, or some other managed system. The ultimate problem with Cognito though is the vendor lock in. (Last I checked, which was years ago) in order to migrate users out, they have to reset their password which would cause users to bounce off your service instead of renewing their subscription.

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robwwilliams 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are different level of who gets locked in. Almost every health care system in the USA is locked in to either an Epic/Oracle barrel or a Cerner barrel. I hope AI breaks this duopoly open soon.

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phist_mcgee 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Let's see how it shakes out after Athropic and OpenAI fully stop subsidizing their plans, that may alter the calculus.