Now I'm kinda thinking of trying per token for both, using GLM 5.2 on Fireworks for most tasks, shelling out to the big boys only when needed. Not totally confident I'll break even though.
More now than ever (since original ChatGPT release), the OSS models and open harnesses (eg Pi) are looking mighty attractive.
But I’m reminded of ~2008 and the rise of “the cloud” as a marketing term that seemed to me to be a cover for dropping an expectation of rich clients, increasing a companies margins around subscriptions that would chip away at local ownership.
Then I got offput by the zealotry and absolutism around “true FoSS”, told myself I was young and moved on.
And really, a lot of subscription models I kind of can appreciate/ tolerate. Might be irksome but whatever, I get that software is expensive to make and it’s not fair in 2026 to value a yearly upgrade of Photoshop at $200. The capricious UI changes to things that’ve worked for 20 years and they take away say the classic color swatches altogether - silly and dumb.
I can use another professionally necessary tool I pay $200/ mo for, Codex, to whip up a classic swatch plugin.
Is that $200 a fair price for my token usage? I think an extremely heavy month I might’ve used a billion tokens?
But that right there is the problem. They have no idea what, specifically, profitability looks like and are going to be pulling endless levers for … I genuinely have no idea how long - at least through 2030/2032 if we tea leaves their debt obligations?
I don’t want to think about any of that. At all. I don’t want to spend time evaluating model preference and degradation and updating the nuances of how I “speak” to an AI because there’s some mystery backend experiment running on the output I use to produce functional outputs — ie the actual products I get paid to build/ maintain.
AI’s something between a tool and coworking companion, and the capricious “personality” changes due to playing with poorly understood and knobs and levers at the inference level - is maddening. To that end, I want a box in the corner I can point to and know exactly the quality of outputs that no one but myself modifies.
There has been a step change... in the amount of whining and complaining coders exhibit lately.
When I agree with the data: I will boast about the victories of science and empiricism, we found the perfect set of natural abstractions that are necessary and sufficient to map out the territory that carve at the joints of the problem, any concern about assumptions is rebutted with generic "Well, we're just pragmatists; we're not perfect, but clearly we're converging on the right direction! You're clearly someone who just wants to nitpick and not get any work done."
My experience with certain hackernews commenters in a nutshell.
"There's no evidence to prove xyz" then they would say, as your evidence was never as rigorous as theirs. And since they were proclaimed to be the only authorized scientists in the room, by authority of big governing bodies, they were right.
So people will see whatever evidence they want, and whine and complain to dig into their side as tribalistic creatures.