Comment by bird0861

I fully agree with this POV but for one detail; there is a problem with sunsetting frontier models. As we begin to adopt these tools and build workflows with them, they become pieces of our toolkit. We depend on them. We take them for granted even. And then the model either changes (new checkpoints, maybe alignment gets fiddled with) and all of the sudden prompts no longer yield the same results we expected from them after working on them for quite some time. I think the term for this is "prompt instability". I felt this with Gemini 3 (and some people had less pronounced but similar experience with Sonnet releases after 3.7) which for certain tasks that 2.5Pro excelled at..it's just unusable now. I was already a local model advocate before this but now I'm a local model zealot. I've stopped using Gemini 3 over this. Last night I used Qwen3 VL on my 4090 and although it was not perfect (sycophancy, overuse of certain cliches...nothing I can't get rid of later with some custom promptsets and a few hours in Heretic) it did a decent enough job of helping me work through my blindspots in the UI/UX for a project that I got what I needed.

If we have to perform tuning on our prompts ("skills", agents.md/claude.md, all of the stuff a coding assistant packs context with) every model release then I see new model releases becoming a liability more than a boon.