Does it really? Or is it that they're all pretty much good enough and so you just go with what's cheapest or what you're used to?

For example, in IntelliJ I can switch between maybe a dozen models with a drop-down but the only time I do it is when whatever model I'm currently using has an outage.

Another example, our product has some ai features (not coding related). I use spring-ai and so I can change models just in the config file. But I stick with deepseek because it's more than good enough and is super cheap.

It’s pretty well established by now that harness matters as much as a model. Even if a model is smart enough to work around harness’ limitations, it may take it way more time, context and money.