[weitendorf]

The UIs all bake in system prompts and other tunable configs that the API leaves open, so does Claude Code and other harnesses. So anything you notice different over the API when you're controlling the client is almost certainly that. Note that this is kind of something they have to do because consumer UI users will do stuff like ask models their name or date, or want it to respond politely and compassionately, and get upset/confused when they just get what's in the weights.

The problem with subscriptions for this kind of stuff is that it's just incompatible with their cost structure. The worst being, subscription usage is going to follow a diurnal usage pattern that overlaps with business/API users, so they're going to have to be offloaded to compute partners who most likely charge by the resource-second. And also, it's a competitive market, anybody who wants usage-based pricing can just get that.

So you basically end up with adverse selection with consumer subscription models. It's just kind of an incoherent business model that only works when your value proposition is more than just compute (which has a usage-based, pretty fungible market)