> The small ones that you can run on a MacBook are quite useless for programming.

That really depends on your Macbook :). If you throw enough RAM at it, something like a qwen3-coder will be pretty good. It won't stack up to Claude, or Gemini or GPT, of course, but it's certainly better than nothing and better than useless.

> No company is going to pay for subscriptions to all of them.

They don't have to, every lab offers API based pricing. If Anthropic is down, I can hop straight into Codex and use GPT-5 via API, or Gemini via Vertex, or just hop onto AWS Bedrock and continue to use Claude etc.

I don't think this is an issue in practice, honestly.