[TeMPOraL]

This is not ideal, but it's pragmatic - or at least was, for the last two years - since new models showed large improvements across the board. If your main problem was capability, not cost, then switching was an easy win - from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, from GPT-4 to say Sonnet 3.5, to Gemini 2.5 Pro, now to Opus (if you can afford it); or from Sonnet 3.5 to Deepseek-R1, to o3 (and that doesn't even consider multi-model solutions). The jump in capability was usually quite apparent.

Of course, Hamel is right too. In the long run, people will need to take more scientific approach. They already do, if inference costs are the main concern.