Somewhere, right now, a senior engineer is on the verge of a nervous breakdown because his company will not let him switch from Claude to GPT-5.2, or from GPT to Gemini, or from any of them to a locally-hosted llama that smells faintly of the intern’s vape juice. He is convinced that the model is the product, that the difference between shipping and slop is measured in the number of parameters, and that if only management would approve the more expensive API key, all his problems would evaporate like a hallucinated citation.

He is wrong. Spectacularly, expensively, and in a way that will cost him exactly the difference between the two API tiers he is agonising over.

Allow me to explain, in the manner of a man who has spent the last year building the thing he is about to tell you matters more than the model itself.

Important notice: my blog has been moved to https://blog.yokerhood.com for good.