What happens one day when there is a significant outage of Claude or Codex and reliance on these tools as SaaS services is so great that it start to impact productivity and work? Will we just pack up our tools and go home?
It's not clear if or when these tools become as essential as power or internet to a developers or admins work, but if they do? Giving everyone a quarter day off at least generates some good-will, unlike forcing them to sit around unproductively because of working hours.
While there is some lock-in for the hardest tasks, for most of what people do LLMs are rapidly becoming a commodity.
In fact, right this minute I have Opus benchmarking Kimi alongside itself to determine which workflows we'll switch to using Kimi by default and Opus as the fallback instead of vice versa. It has already conceded Kimi does better on several tasks.
If I needed to fall back on OpenRouter, it'd be paid per token, of course, but that'd take 4 major providers being down, in which case I suspect I'll have more critical things to worry about.
As it is, I use more than I could with a single $200 Claude Max subscription anyway, so I distribute my tasks across multiple providers.
Even without that it's cheap insurance given the cost of lost time.