I agree with swapping models making it easy. With openrouter, I just change the provider. With reasonix harness, cache hits are basically free. And that's with unsubsidized American providers like Digital Ocean or cloudflare.
replyIndeed, as it gets more commoditized it feels more like swapping electricity providers. Who cares whether you get your electricity from IBM or the state of Texas? An amp is an amp.
replyThat's an interesting question. What if we did care? Is this amp from burning dinosaurs or from the sun or from fission? What if we could tag power as coming from oil vs renewables? how would that affect our habits?
replyWe care indirectly through cost. Hydroelectric, solar, or wind power are often among the cheapest electricity sources, for example. Beyond that, no we don't care. That's why if people want change we leverage policy on cost, via subsidies, surcharges, taxes, tariffs, what have you.
replyTo a consumer, an amp remains an amp — so they get the cheap one.
I'm using pi-coder with just the free-tier models I can get on openrouter / opencode / kilocode. When I run out of quota on one model I often switch to another model in the same session, and it generally works just fine.
replyWhen I use it for fiction, I generally switch models 2-3 times per response. It's basically normal
reply