At some point one has to wonder if it's still worth using anthropic's models if we need to babysit 100% of its output with another vendor's model. Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

I can't help but feel the circumstances that enable this kind of front page article are vestigial from the days when OAI was super bad and Anthropic was beyond reproach. This change-over-time is why I avoid getting tribal with technology vendors. Assigning ideological motives to 200k+ employee organizations is how we wind up in weird contortions like this.

Most rational actors simply moved from one to the other. It takes a special kind of devotion to the proverbial hole in the ground to keep pushing in this direction.

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

Effectively all models can do style transfer reasonably well at this point, but not so much for "actual reasoning".

If the combination of two works better for you than each one by itself, why wouldn't you stack them like that?

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

This is what I think too. But, users’ psychology might be playing a role here. Anthropic has great advantage from being the first major player delivering functional agentic coding solution (rather than an intelligent autocomplete) and they were able to impress people by Opus’ iterative improvements early this year.

It’s technically very easy to switch between models, harnesses but their moat or perhaps a main source of users’ friction could be FOMO. That’s especially powerful in this competitive environment where everyone keeps wondering/worrying about what others might be doing to get or stay ahead.

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

Because it's not an either or thing. Neither is sufficient. I'd argue that, expenses aside, you should have every model you have access to cross reviewing the work of the others.

Outside of super trivial things that I should have just done myself, I have a cross-model review of _everything_ these days. The tokens are too cheap not to.

individuals can blow in the wind, but if you are a company who bought a thousand seats and spent a ton of time training people up, establishing policies, vetting which extensions are allowed, the transition cost is much higher.