[asgraham]

I don’t know about your first point: at some point the three-year difference may not be worth the premium, as local models reach “good enough.”

But the second point seems even less likely to be true: why will Claude code and Gemini cli always be superior? Other than advantageous token prices (which the people willing to pay the aforementioned premium shouldn’t even care about), what do they inherently have over third-party tooling?

[nickstinemates]

Even using Claude Code vs. something like Crush yields drastically different results. Same model, same prompt, same cost... the agent is a huge differentiator, which surprised me.

[asgraham]

I totally agree that the agent is essential, and that right now Claude Code is semi-unanimously the best agent. But agentic tooling is written, not trained (as far as I can tell—someone correct me) so it’s not immediately obvious to me that a third-party couldn’t eventually do it better.

Maybe to answer my own question, LLM developers have one, potentially two advantages over third-party tooling developers: 1) virtually unlimited tokens, zero rate limiting with which to play around with tooling dev. 2) the opportunity to train the network on their own tooling.

The first advantage is theoretically mitigated by insane VC funding, but will probably always be a problem for OSS.

I’m probably overlooking news that the second advantage is where Anthropic is winning right now; I don’t have intuition for where this advantage will change with time.