I have similar concerns.

We will miss SaaS dearly. I think history is repeating just with DVD and streaming - we simply bought the same movie twice.

AI more and more feels the same. Half a year ago Claude Opus was Anthropics most expensive model - boy, using Claude Opus 4.6 in the 500k version is like paying 1 dollar per minute now. My once decent budgets get hit not after weeks but days (!) now.

And I am not using agents, subagents which would only multiply the costs - for what?

So what we arrive more and more is the same as always: low, medium, luxury tier. A boring service with different quality and payment structures.

Proof: you cannot compensate with prompt engineering anymore. Month ago you fixed any model discrepancies by being more clever and elaborate with your prompts etc.

Not anymore. There is a hidden factor now that accounts for exactly that. It seems that the reliance on skills and different tiers simply moves us away from prompt engineering which is considered more and more jailbreaking than guidance.

Prompt engineering lately became so mundane, I wonder what vendors were really doing by analyzing the usage data. It seems like that vendors tied certain inquiries with certain outcomes modeled by multistep prompting which was reduced internally to certain trigger sentences to create the illusion of having prompted your result while in fact you haven't.

All you did was asking the same result thousands of user did before and the LLM took an statistical approach to deliver the result.