And yet me and quite some others still yearn for a flash alternative. There never was one.

Any of us could vibe code flash now. How to coordinate it as a dev ecosystem of designers and users?

Does it make sense for everyone to JITVibe presentation apps like the person above? Maybe we'll evolve to branding.

Surely not just prompting like this and it will one shot it. The usefulness of the flash authoring tool, was it was battle tested and polished.

But I did gave it a shot to took up developement again of abandoned www.wickeditor.com (a web reimplementation of flash). Good results, but limited time and energy for that right now.

But…

Photoshop is king. Everything else is behind by a solid decade. If you’re a professional the $40 a month or whatever it is now means nothing to you as well. It has the professionals are all on it, and because the price isn’t astronomical, that’s what everyone else uses who needs to use that kind of program more than once in a blue moon.

Premier? Replaceable. Lightroom? Pretty replaceable though still somewhat ahead. Photoshop? There’s only one Photoshop. And as much as I’m loathe to give Adobe any credit, it’s the best by a mile. There are too many essential features in QoL things that other programs are missing.

Luckily my department doesn’t need it, but if we did, we would simply have to accept Photoshop.

Not all tools are non-destructive in GIMP. Things like raw support, smart objects, retouching, etc. all either are super thin compared to Photoshop or require workarounds/a lot of manual effort. There are just lots of tools you expect in Photoshop that either don’t exist or exist in an inferior form. I can’t elaborate too much because I don’t really touch Photoshop much these days, but I work with people who do and worked in production long enough to know the expectations. GIMP is great but Adobe is a massive company with deep pockets, it’s hard to keep up. Their user experience is miserable but the tool itself is just far more robust

Google tried like no one else to have a chat app and it failed miserably more than a handful of times.

I don't get the need to have Anthropic build their custom versions of MS Office apps, I can tell Claude to generate a word doc from a wiki page and it does a pretty damn good job. Anthropic's statistical median level of software that they had Claude create isn't going to replace Office apps to the point where companies cancel/stop renewing their MS Office subscriptions/licenses.

The other element is trust. Do end users trust their data in Anthropic's systems? A lot of people get creeped out when they search for content from one device in their household and then nearly instantaneously they start seeing ads from other devices on the same topic. How creepy will AI get if it starts consuming all your docs, spreadsheets, personal finance info, emails, etc.?

On the trust thing - I don't trust anthropic and I don't think MS has been a great steward over the years either.

It's hard to see Anthropic replacing it, and even if so - why bother, the revenue is miniscule. They need 100 MS Offices for the compute contracts to pencil out.

The thing that I'm less clear on is, if and when they achieve some kind of recursive improvement exponential growth thingy, isn't that going to heavily disrupt the entire economy / stock market? In that environment, would Anthropic's stocks really be a good bet, given they have to operate within the economy?

That's a long-term problem to be dealt later, greed dictates to pursue the former as long as the music is playing and everyone is dancing. Similar to 2007-2008 when it was clear that things were breaking but the incentives were to play the game for as long as possible before it imploded.

It is a myth. They are chasing science fiction. They either dream of an omniscient overseer who will take control of society and nominate its shareholders-parents into the governing elite, or they envision a chatbot that will solve every problem, again turning shareholders into the power brokers. They forget that nobody will ever be allowed to "win capitalism" and take over the planet. Companies have are torn down for far far less. Every AI model is data, ones and zeros. It therefore can be copied/shared/leaked. Intellectual Property law is not a ladder for assent to lordship. It can and will be rewritten or outright ignored rather than allow capitalism to collapse.

I think that at this point gAI is just a marketing blurb, and the actual race is to dominate current practical applications involving basic RAG and ReAct loops. This can go from anything between software development, business intelligence, and market research. A company whose top brass can use a team of agents to do what nowadays they assign to mid- and top-level management is an executive with tighter control over the whole business process. For this you don't need gAI.

Changing LLM backend on other hand takes 2 seconds.

- A stable and reliable platform you can build your prod on

- "Unlimited" capacity (something impossible today with the amount of GPUs available outside of labs)

- ZDR that is trusted by companies vs a random provider on OpenRouter

- Central governance

- E2E integration in their CLIs/Web clients/Desktop Client/etc...

Nobody trusts Anthropic's ZDR, in the limited cases where they even offer it. The key thing is that weight activation sequences from a query are not "customer data" they are internal Anthropic data. So in Anthropic's legal theory they are training on their own internal data, not "customer data," and that is perfectly legal, even though it is the exact same thing in practice as training directly on customer data.

Additionally, the gateway allows for caching, additional security checks, centralized monitoring. I think most corporations have a multi-provider setup anyway.

They need to leverage Claude Code in the software industry to position themselves as the go-to platform for businesses.

Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft, which already dominate that area, seem to be dormant.

Google owns 15% of Anthropic I think.

And Google offers Argon 4 to paying Workspace and Google One customers now. How's what was the number 1 model on nearly every single bench a few weeks ago being "dormant"?

I know people all in in the Google ecosystem (getting credits from Android phones they buy etc.) who only swear by the Google models and who are now using Argon 4: I asked them and a few days ago they had access (but they were already using other Google models before that).

Doesn't GMail have billions account by now?

I'd tend to say with billions of users on GMail and a model like Argon and 15% of the Anthropic shares, Google is not where you think it is.

It's almost like the workspace devs are anthropic plants that are purposely underminig google.

The fact that Frontier AI can become Google Workspace at a flip of a switch is what is crazy valuable. Anthropic and OpenAI can enter and disrupt any market, especially software, faster than any company ever could, because users want the flow to start and end in their chat interfaces.

I’ve been using Office Copilot more or less since it was released, and the general opinion around the office is that it’s a huge waste of time. The auto-transcripts produce 3 pages of fluff when previously someone would send 3 sentences’ worth of what actually mattered. The auto-drafted documents rarely add anything meaningful beyond what was already in the prompt. The question answering and research tools are only as good as Sharepoint/Confluence/Jira/etc’s pre-existing search feature, and therefore untrustworthy, etc.

What made Anthropic exciting was they had locked onto a use case that reliably generates positive value: coding. Not much else has proven, from a business perspective, to be anything more than an exceptionally buzzworthy money pit.

Gemini is unable to take an attachment from gmail, read it, then place it in the correct drive folder and update a spreadsheet with what it found in the attachment.

For whatever reason, Google decided to firewall "Gmail Gemini" from "Drive Gemini". Gmail Gemini can send files to drive, but not edit anything, and Drive Gmail can edit files, but cannot be initiated from gmail.

Meanwhile claude code with Google extensions can do this no problem.

Google, wtf are you doing?

The fact that Claude is available through bedrock also reveals in my opinion the weakness of Anthropic, they felt they had no choice to reach the entreprise market.

They stroke a great discount deal with all, so different teams/departments have different provider, and those using Copilot are even free to switch between models as they please (although with lower usage limits).

You could make the argument that it's not worth switching SAAS providers for enterprises when the costs were like 10 dollars a month per developer and switchign would require 1 team to work for half a year... but with AI providers it's more like paying 1000 dollars a month per developer vs paying 200 dollars if you strike a good deal with different provider and swtiching costs are more like 4 to 8 hours of work for each developer.

I'm not so sure about this. I guess it depends on how well people did their job there.

Ideally, whatever people built is loosely coupled to that third-party resource, meaning that switching cost will stay low.

After all, it's probably just prompts + an API layer. Unless one micro-optimizes their prompts for claude (which then breaks once a new checkpoint drops, hence is a bad idea regardless), pointing them towards a different API endpoint should be doable.

Then you have no choice bit to use your own hosted model because that's the only way you can be sure the model isn't going to be removed or quantized/nerfed behind your back.

If your system can widstand the fluctuations of closed models over time, then it can most likely support switching between multiple providers in the first place.

Once the open weight models are good and cheap enough, there is not reason not to use them

Given that the goal of the whole project is outsourcing the work, what are you expecting here?

Have you used Copilot at a company?

I can literally change my model in 3 seconds.

The moat is as shallow as it gets. Investing in a single LLM provider at the moment would be a mistake.

A lot of the non-technical and semi-technical folks are only comfortable using a specific client like the Claude desktop app. A lot of teams wrote skills and eval'd/benchmarked their skills specific to a model family and harness.

The "I can use any model, any harness" or "I only use a meta harness" (Orca, Paseo, Herdr, etc.) crew is relatively small IRL. Most people are still single-session, single platform user mode.

Most orgs have an enterprise contract with a single provider so all of their internal assets are built for the provider. It goes beyond skills, but also the telemetry, enterprise policies, and managed configuration.

We have a developer on our team that keeps asking for a claude code enterprise license, we keep telling them "no, it's way too expensive, get used to using the copilot extension/cli".

For consumers, sure, but the bulk of the revenue opportunity is enterprise. Anthropic/OpenAI have a hard row to hoe IMO.

It may still be possible to use the CC harness with the Copilot sub.

* using OpenAI supports the Altman/Thiel/Musk/Ellison/Karp/Trump billionaire Orwellian worldview and also ads

* using Grok supports a ketamine-addled open fascist sympathizer jizz-spewing 12-year-old-edginess memelord and his similarly broken worldview

* Google's models are pretty good but every single product they have ever had is ultimately either suborned or killed by the advertising division

* local models pretty much only half-exist because Jensen Huang wanted to cheat on his wife; future is unclear

One can argue for harnesses and so forth being lock-in, but the ultimate lock-in is morality and wanting to have a civilization at the end of all of this; I can't recommend either enough

Yes, either Google Gemini or MS Copilot. Both come as part of their Office suite licenses.

If there exists a need and a business case for companies having access to frontier models out of OpenAI and Claude, a provider with those services will appear.

Also for larger companies like Amazon the danger is they replace Anthropic completely with self-hosted models.

I think other companies are probably doing the same, the moat of a AWS/GCP/Azure is much deeper with how contrived it is to migrate between them even if you abstract as much as possible with something like Kubernetes.

The model is just some REST endpoint you switch out even in a lot of enterprise setups.

It depends, if you're automating business processes (honestly probably where the money is), then you'll need a really comprehensive set of evals and moniotoring to ensure stuff doesn't break if/when you change providers.

If you have none of that, then switching will be very expensive (but it was ever thus).

I'm thinking of stuff that would typically be outsourced (like compliance stuff for identity verification et al), where it's really really hard to have deterministic rules.

LLMs are definitely a step up in dealing with fuzzy inputs, and enables you to mostly automate stuff that really wasn't feasible before.

But you do need really good evals and monitoring to make this work effectively.

Unless your self-hosting open weight models, you need this even if you don't change providers, since you have no control of what's on the other side of the API.

For us it's as easy as clicking a dropdown. The copilot vs code extension allows for this ez pz, the same is true for companies that implement an AI gateway for other tooling.

Once they realise that you can use Deepseek / GLM for 10% of the cost these labs are done.

This is the era for boomers to get over their fear of the command line.

Claude code is a terminal interface not a command line tool. More like vim than sed.

Speaking as someone who has been at professionally this since the 1980s, I suggest that while sometimes switching costs and network effects happen "organically," in this century businesses devote enormous amounts of attention to artificially building switching costs.

It's such a dirty practice that we have a four-letter word for it, a "moat." But of course, the moat isn't really to keep competitors out of a market, it's actually to keep customers trapped within it.

I fully expect every one of these AI providers to put as much work into trying to trap their customers within their ecosystem that they do to improve their capabilities.

(Since we're talking about moats and cyber-feudalism, where does siege warfare come in?)

Then, inexorably, it shifts from winning customers to defending their turf.

Then, inexorably, it shifts from protecting turf to maximizing extraction from their turf.

If you believe that this will be different, why not? But for now, I'm expecting this to go the same way.

It's the end of an era. Lets pray open weight models give us a real choice soon.

In the meantime, Stonks up Anthropic.

it's easier than changing okta

it's easier than changing google docs and even Gmail

it's easier than migrating cloud

etc.

and we're talking several magnitudes easier too!

Once the cost reaches a threshold, everything is doable. We ditched Datadog in less than a month. Someone I know had their company ditch slack in a quarter and google cloud usage of 100+ million in two. Everything is doable.

I think when something becomes a management-level item in an org, like AI, it is a hard thing to switch unless it becomes a management-level problem.

Most of the orgs are responsible for this and will do whatever it takes politically or not, to justify the decision unless management overturns it.

I already mentioned the timelines. Cost is a beautiful line item in your balance sheet that can get things done pretty quickly, especially when it’s as big as AI. It took less than 2 quarters for us to go from “hey use ai in everything or get fired” to “hey we’re putting in default limits that are intentionally very low, if you need more, you’re going to need approvals”.

The stickiness of AI as a whole, let alone a specific provider is not that high as people are making it out to be.

I don't think this is entirely true. Companies are deploying open-source LLM gateways to be able to do that very easily now. Today, you can switch Claude CLI to any model besides Anthropic via https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm and there are major companies doing that.

This works with your favourite ADEs such as Orca as well so I disagree with this premise. The whole experience of switching is pretty seemless based on personal experience.

I really think you overestimate the level of lock in here. If a companies tells the devs to use X because it cost 1/10 of the price they will just have to suck it up and switch.

I didn't particular want to work on a "all in agentic project" but that the nature of being employed.

The same LLM we use day to day will make it trivial to switch out providers in our infrastructure.

I am really surprised that companies who are worried about AI spend don't try that route.

First, everyone and their mom is selling AI now. It is being bundled in nearly every product. Buy CRM to run your company - they will upsell you their bespoke AI - mostly RAG/chatbot using the data inside the platform. This is an important area because today lot of companies are trying to build their own AI bespoke workflows. But companies like SAP, Oracle will spend money on improving this aspect. And people who buy/use AI for this purpose don't care if the underlying AI is Claude or not.

Then there are cloud providers. You can get Claude, OpenAI from AWS Bedrock etc. They will take the heavy lifting of changing integrations, IP concerns etc to keep people on their platform. With time expect them to make it even easier, not harder to switch models. Also, they will push for open source models because it will be more profitable.

Lastly buying from direct providers. This is here the lock in comes in. But I believe fewer and fewer enterprise will buy directly - many preferring to buy against their cloud commitments.

As you have written, the agentic harness is a slightly different matter with plugins and features. But the core tech makes replicating software a lot easier so you can in principle use an agent to make it easier to switch from its own harness. There are caveats to this since in practice the quality and feature sets of harnesses are not the same. But in my opinion, it is far easier to switch agents than switching other tech that came before them that used proprietary formats and apis to lock you in.

1. switching costs

2. fungibility

I do agree that LLMs have low switching costs. But they are not fungible - each model is unique with different strengths and weaknesses.

I also disagree that they can increase switching costs by moving in application stack.

If I needed to implement a simple function that is well described, all LLMs (for the most part) are fungible. They will have almost identical implementations (sans variable names) and all be fit for purpose.

The recent Anthropic push into biomedical research gives a clue.

The moment you find a money-making formula on top of someone else's black box model, there's nothing stopping them from taking it for themselves.

Stories are much fewer and further between for people using the API. Which makes sense, the subsidized plans are "You get what we give" whereas the API is "You get what you pay for".

It is not something that has affected productivity in any measurable way.

Concerns of AI labs illegally accessing your usage data to steal your business model are a similarly imagined problem.

Personally I make my business decisions based on real results, which are imo significantly better with the latest SOTA models.

We also see that enterprise revenue is more important than end users when we compare Anthropic's financials to OpenAI.

...so, Google?

something I find even easier is to never pay anything to the creators of the most inhumane, antagonistic skynet-tier chatbot ever

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In my testing (incredibly similar workflows, moving around between claude code and cursor), I haven't found that much difference between Sonnet and GLM-5.3/flash.

Sonnet seems lazier, but has better prompt adherence, and is constantly telling me it can't do things, while GLM will just Find A Way to do whatever I've asked for.

I really appreciate being able to see GLM's thinking tokens, as I can head it off quicker. Claude's a little harder to steer, but the integration in Claude code makes it much easier to leave it running on things overnight, which is hard to get working properly in Cursor.

Overall, I'm not sure Anthropic have that much of a moat, in coding particularly. This seems weird to me, as they have so much more usage data that's hard to replicate.

The difference between Anthropic's models and alternatives is not as big as Google Search vs other search engines

The other pillar is hardware but I think that's only going to last a few years at most.

These trillion dollar valuations were based on the idea of "winning" and "owning" AI (IMHO) and the open weight models have killed that outcome. Now it's a rush to cash out before it all comes tumbling back to Earth.

I’ll always remember the good times.

But you’re wrong ser about small or cheaper models. Choosing to work or not having a choice to work with cheaper models means you work slower and more methodically because you have to plan out the work and size it to fit. This has huge implications on the value of the work you can produce as an employee or solo developer, and it’s a skill working with these SOTA models - there is specific crafting that must be done to be effective with each and their capabilities.

You will see the old eyeball real estate game, forcing more of your experience into their apps and platform so you can see ads or “new slop features”. You will see the SOTA models more closely guarded in an effort to bait you into that platform, and yes, you will see them doing things they never should be doing, moving towards an open AI like model where it can order a pizza, where monetization it was always important, but is now the golden rule, before all else.

I hope open models can at least give me opus 4.8 experience soon, I can work with that. But nothing out there today can do it and that terrifies me.

And AWS is willing to let things die - they make so much money they don't care. I don't see that being the case for Anthropic.

Anthropic has shown a consistent ability to deliver the best general purpose models. Can that continue indefinitely? Will models become "good enough"? Will open weight models catch up to SOTA models? Will some genius start a new company with better models?

And, on Anthropic's side, will they be able to use their market power that comes from being the best to push through regulations that will create a moat; instituting some sort of mandatory safety checks that coincidentally are exactly what Claude is trained to pass, regulating the amount of compute or trying to claw back data centers to prevent new training, etc.

Or maybe they just have the magic sauce and they're going to stay on top of the game and people (like me) will be happy to continue paying money for their product.

I am finding some really routine tasks to be borderline with frontier models. Performing E2E testing of enterprise web apps would clearly disintegrate with local models. You need that reasoning black box on top. I don't care what your favorite benchmark says. I care about what actually fucking works.

The people who don't understand the economic situation are those who are in the pure play space with AI and multi agent circuses. Why bother spending any money when the occasional failure has literally no consequences? Who in their right mind would pre-pay for tokens?! I wish I could see the statistics on what % of HN uses AI for fun vs for work. It is clearly a kind of Factorio entertainment experience for a lot of people. If I was just using it for entertainment this whole IPO business would look really silly to me too.

The eventual logical move is that they build a completely reinvented AI-native operating system.

The funding they're getting gives them the resources to build and compete on a fundamental level, IMHO.

If you don't believe me, look at the recent demo where they had Fable 5.2 build an OS from scratch.

They are coming for the whole stack, my opinion.

And making products fast and first over quality has never stopped these companies from trying, when they have so much funding....

The fact that their desktop offerings are so pap is an indictment of their engineering prowess and a demonstration of their apparent inability to use their own (actually very good!) LLMs to generate decent software.

It baffles me how a technology so good at spewing out software is apparently unused by the people who are developing the technology.

I've lived through enough hype cycles in tech myself that I do know that eventually it tones back down and people go back to work, perhaps altered from what they did before with new approaches, but back to work nonetheless.

I just felt myself that this particular technology, and this particular cycle, might be a little different - let alone in how it caused changed in our society whether it worked or now, but that also, there is still room to go.

I'd be fascinated to know what they say on the inside, if there is still room to go and to improve, or if we're nearer some sort of plateau in progress.

There will be a lot of competition in that space, because everyone will try to build an "AI OS", whatever that means to them.

There is someone already experimenting in this space - the guy who founded Basecamp and is building Omarchy [1] Linux... he sees it.. how long until these companies do?

If they don't build this, what will Microsoft do? Both Microsoft and Apple are well down their way, Apple is probably further ahead, but neither of them are the frontier model companies.

"Everybody will try to build an AI OS", but which ones are the most likely to survive in our current economic system?

If our economic system was based on partnership, I might agree there isn't much point in these companies building OSes, but ours is based on competition and domination generally... so unless the AI bubble truly does pop and the funding stops (which it may of course), how else do they keep fueling their stock prices to dominate the market?

I think something is going to have to give somewhere in the chain... otherwise the ease with which any software can be replaced will be too high and I suspect they will be forced to compete.

One last thought - between Microsoft/Apple or Anthropic/OpenAI - long term - who is in a better position? The debate arises from that question, in my opinion.

[1] https://omarchy.org/

If Microsoft or Google's AI is killing it, and it's built into the OS, how will Anthropic or OpenAI compete unless we run into the same old antitrust/competition issues with OS?

At that point, they might just say - "fine, it's easier to just have our big AI brains and money make a new OS we control and we can compete too."

I guess that could be a thing, but, that puts them in competition with the people who they might want to be their customers, whereas I don't necessarily know that they would see other tech companies as customers unless they were super interested in partnerships.

According to "the normal progression of companies" though, you might be right because after a company has becoming big enough and exhausts consuming its own market, it often expands into verticals - we've seen that with traditional big 5 consulting companies or IBM, where they expanded into "working embedded with their customers on their problems directly" many years ago, and now every company in the industry approaches it that way.

That is corporate partnership and field work, not so much consuming the other person's work/business... whereas I could see them just consuming the OS because "it's no big deal when you can do everything you need with AI".

But I take your point.

Sucks to be them then, the best chance we have to keep this thing under control is not have the same supplier give you the whole stack.

Asking sincerely... apart from FOMO subscription revenue, what is the actual money-making proposition?

I have been playing about with different models having started a new job recently, the medium priced ones don't seem any worse so far. Admittedly my tasks have been fairly straightforwards so far.

Qwen3.8 and Meta Muse Glimmer are great at "fill in the middle" of frontier architectures and plans

Delegating like a CEO down a pipeline of expensive experts to cheaper local small models could become a common trope, especially if Apple M7 and beyond, and chip competition exists to keep forward progress, SaaS models are cooked.

Token vending is little more than behaving as a "wrapper app" over electricity. There is zero technical moat to their business.

- work: I need frontier, cost of mistake is huge - home: i do entire renovation with it, cost of mistake is big. monitor baby health, development, etc: cost of mistake is big , taxes: cost of mistake is big casual researches about certain facts, shopping, booking: cost of mistake is medium

non of this fits : i will run an expensive laptop hidden from the baby, since i'm on the move, there is a small percent of casual queries that normally will go into finish products: google ai, muse, etc.