If one day you open up Claude Code and it’s Opus 5.1 now instead of Opus 5, no big deal. It probably will work about the same as it did before. Maybe a little better.
Or if you’re on Codex and some new cool Claude model comes out, no worries. There will probably be a similar new model for Codex within a few weeks. Maybe even within a few days.
A dev in my team saw a new model and changed one application to use said model (essentially changing the contents of a url). One week later I received an escalation from the CTO of the company that our pace of weekly usage was in the millions of dollars (rather than low hundred thousands). Turns out that the new model was 5x more expensive but no one noticed.
Imagine buying a shiny new PC in the 90s only to see it become practically obsolete within a year.
If you bought a mid-tier computer that was good enough for what you needed, then you probably didn't shop/compare for the next few years and didn't notice. But if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less. This is how it was in the 90's PC boom, at least. Likely the same for the decades before, not sure how it went in the 2000's.
This is not how I remember that period at all. Do you have any examples?
386 to 486 to the first Pentium (with the bug!)... You did not upgrade in place, it was often a new system. Sure, you maybe kept your screen, keyboard etc but ... The only upgrade we had on the same MB, was a coprocessor upgrade. Remember those? Each new generation of CPU was a new motherboard. Upgrading CPUs in the same MB really became a thing only later on.
GPUs had a shelf life of barely a year. Its been 35 year but i remember TNT to TNT2 having like 9 month in between. Moving from 2D to 3D involved a constant cost as GPUs evolved fast and the latest games required latest hardware.
We have not talked about the ISA, AGP, and PCI fun ... The “bus wars”.
DOS to Windows 3.1 (and OS/2 somewhere in between) to 95 ... with software being pushing hardware, just like games did.
This is why people are spoiled with cheap PC hardware where its cheap, and easily lasts 4+ years. Even with the bad memory price and more expensive GPUs, your can stil buy a $1500 system that will last you years (with maybe some lower game settings later on ... or the catalog of 10.000s games that will easily run on a mid tier GPU).
PC hardware has become boring but extreme stable. You can run GPUs for year, switch MBs without issues while keeping large amounts of old hardware. That was NOT the 80s and 90s that i remember.
The 386 and 486 were 3.5 years apart, weren’t they?
In 1992 a Solidtech 486 w/ 4 MB of RAM and a slightly-smaller 125 MB hard drive sold for $2195
Both advertised in Computer Shopper and you can find their catalogues(?) online.
My numbers were slightly off apparently, but is that enough to change the point?
Then one day the hard drive appeared to die. I eventually realised the issue was located around the 1.5gb mark, so I recreated my Linux partitions after 2gb and it worked fine for the rest of the year.
I also believe you could get motherboards that supported 2 Celeron chips. I have no idea how effective/useful it was, but it was certainly a cheap/interesting way to get multiple CPU's.
The pace of change ("practically obsolete") is different then and now.
You don't see Nvidia and AMD fighting every other month over the latest cards.
In practice, you can get away without keeping up with everything all the time. For personal use, pick a provider and get on their ~$20/month plan. Learn their high/medium/low model hierarchy. Start with their highest or second-highest model (GPT-5.6, Opus, etc) and observe your quota usage. If you're doing a lot of manual code review and analysis, the $20/month plan goes very far even on the highest models. If you're trying to vibecode everything as fast as possible it's a different story.
If you keep running into quota limits, experiment with the next model down for easier tasks or adjusting the effort level. If the results are good enough, you've found your fit. If they're not, you might need the next plan up.
For API/business use, you have to be checking your token spend as you go to calibrate to how much each task costs and where you fall in your budget. There are a lot of different tools that make this easy to visualize.
For data tasks, you should have an eval with a golden dataset that you can run against new models for a nominal amount of token expenditure. It should be as simple as pointing the eval script at a new API or model and checking the score versus price.
Input tokens are much cheaper than output tokens. Not only because of baseline price—caching makes a huge difference too. There are many ways to take advantage of this asymmetry to get similar quality for a fraction of the cost!
I appreciate boring tech as much as the next well worn engineer and I'm not saying this is all positive but it's so sure as hell thrilling and you don't have to be an astronaut to immediately benefit (or suffer I guess) from it.
In theory though, there is a minimum viable model for any given task, and we think that is a problem that the big labs will avoid because they profit from charging more per task. We're trying heuristic and LLM-based approaches but it's still a work in progress, so if this is something you'd be interested in trying would highly recommend trying ours out -- any and all feedback at this point is extremely valuable to us.
But more so it seems there is Fear of missing out (FOMO) in our behaviours. The reality is, if whatever model you are using are good for your purpose, well, keep on it.
> Is anyone else just exhausted by the pace of all this.
I have released applications on Gemini 3.5 flash that make real money and I don't see any particular reason to upgrade.