Big yes on this. I do not understand the appeal of skill shopping. The one exception I have is things like the Axiom Apple development skills and e.g. the official Flutter skills. At that point the skills are just docs though. It's either I remember to paste a URL to the official docs or I just install the skill. But shopping around for random skills just sounds extremely unappealing.

Have you seen mattpocock’s skills? I know they are hecka popular with people I work with.

I do both, or rather I do 'skill browsing', for new ideas to then evaluate the skill with my agent if they are useful. Most are not, but some I extract ideas from to augment my own skills https://github.com/flurdy/agent-skills/tree/main/skills#shar...

Though most of the time my skills are just things I found useful and could avoid repeating myself by having as a skill.

That I also use it to route model used with https://github.com/flurdy/pi-skill-model-router is also a reason

You can hire a nanny. I know there's stigma there, too, but I know some "career women" who do this and it works fine. If you're that motivated (and your interests are lucrative enough), you can pull it off.

This is perpetually an issue with the whole field of AI/LLMs. The experience is so personal. Every time I talk to someone about their use of LLMs for software engineering, I'm shocked by their approaches and experiences. They say "X model keeps missing things" when I rely on it heavily for being thorough. They say "Y always gives me the best results" when I can't stand it.

People will see/think that I'm doing very well with my LLM use, and ask me what I'm doing. I tell them, they try it, then later they come back to me saying they just couldn't get it to work.

It’s really inconsistent. There are sessions where it nails everything perfectly and I leave happy. Then there are sessions where every turn it corrects itself and changes it mind. One session recently I found it funny how every single time it did this one task it tripped over itself and killed its own connection. Like 20 times. It didn’t bother me I just found it odd how despite it being noted down in its state file it kept doing it over and over like some idiot. Literally they can’t learn from their mistakes yet.

This is the job now, we are shepherds.

This is why I generally don't trust benchmarks, or anything other than my own experience tbh. It always seems like everyone has a different answer.

If we truly had some AGI model, it would probably be fairly obvious to us all no?

Marketing that makes them look like they have their heads in the sand.

There has been demand for Mac at PC prices since the Mac Classic was announced to the world.

The first time around they almost went broke because people no longer were paying Apple tax, and they did not had any other product to save them.

Nowadays they have the iPhone piggy bank.

Why is being statistics/algorithms wrong? What's wrong with that? The "A" means artificial so none of this seems surprising or weird or bad.

The statistical nature means that what an AI produces is basically the average across all training data, making the generated text extremely bland and personality-less.

Makes it easier to use enterprisey management console type UIs on the go. Also nice for reading large diffs.

Where is the official source for this?

OpenAI's docs still show non-discounted pricing https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-sol

It's discounted if used via OpenRouter, not the official API.

And it's not just on OpenRouter; Vercel offers the same:

https://vercel.com/changelog/gpt-5-6-sol-is-50-off-on-ai-gat...

Doesn't seem like a smart business move.

You're literally encouraging someone else to come in and steal your customer base,

Or it's "normal" market segmentation. OpenRouter users are more price sensitive in general, also a lot of enterprise users who can't switch easily are using the official API (or Bedrock or Azure) and you want to squeeze them as much as you can.

A surprising amount of companies sell exact the same product through different channels for different prices. A good example is Apple.

Multiple times a year, retailers here in Australia have co-ordinated sales on Apple products. Apple.com or their retail stores don't have these sales.

But they're clearly Apple-funded when competing retailers launch the same sales on the same days; and the margins aren't enough for retailers to take a loss.

This imbalance of exchange means that OpenAI is getting something from this deal. Question what is exactly.

Seems reasonably clear to me? Potentially bringing in more customers who use OpenRouter for trying out all the models with rapid switching, enticing them to use Sol. And anyone being routed on price will immediately be switched to OpenAI's servers instead.

It also seems to be providing a vastly better user experience - Azure has less than 99% uptime (Azure USA only has 87% uptime), latency of 20 - 30 seconds, and a mere 8 tokens per second. OpenAI is offering 32 tokens per second (4x faster), 4 seconds latency (5x faster), and all for half the price of what Microsoft is charging for a vastly inferior experience.

Data taken from this page:

https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol#providers

I think being able to A/B test price is invaluable for them. They can't cut prices by 50% and hike it again. By letting others slash the price, they can tell if it is worth it or not to do this officially.

Literally all OEMs do this, if you go to Apple site you won't see any sales, but Amazon and other retailers will have stuff at 20% off regularly

They’re trying to compete with open weight models here. It’s a very different customer segment.

That's weird.

Maybe they (oai) want to pump their marketshare on openrouter lol

Any benefit of pumping marketshare on open router?

if I was going to IPO I'd want higher marketshare and openrouter is the most popular way to measure model usage (not saying it's the most accurate b/c it's not)

How is that not weird?

Has OpenAI struck a deal with openrouter and that's why we're seeing preferred pricing?

Is openrouter taking a loss on sol API calls to grow adoption?

How temporary is the reduction in price?

Selling cheaper through what should be a minor third party, than through the first, party is super weird in commerce.

So the title is misleading, intentionally.

They do decide on the 5% markup. But as far as I can tell, all other routers just match 5%. Not sure what they're competing on.

Yes but Sol dropping in price by 50% is not OpenRouter deciding. It's OpenAI.

I don’t think that’s true. OpenAI docs don’t have this price change. I assume they’d be the source for this post if it was true. The banner on OpenRouter for me says Gemini 3.7 discounted for a limited time, but if I click through that I get to this page: https://openrouter.ai/models?discount=true

That shows a bunch of models, including Sol, with a discount. None of them say how long it’s for, but I’d assume in all their cases it’s for a limited time as the banner said, and only on OpenRouter.

OpenRouter margins are not 50%.

As I understand OAI is offering discount only for users using the model via OR. Not sure why. Maybe they want OR users to try the model and switch to OAI subscription or something.

It might also be worth noting that the discount is only if OpenAI itself is used as the provider via OpenRouter. The discount does not exist for Azure or Amazon hosted Sol.

I posted elsewhere, but the Azure uptime & performance for Sol is truly dire. OpenAI is offering 5x faster latency, 4x faster tokens generation, and vastly better uptime (Azure US has only 87% uptime), all for 50% of the price now. I assume the pricing is to compete with other shiny new models (Grok, Qwen etc), but it might also be to cut-off a truly poorly performing Microsoft hosting experience.

Yes, but this discount must be coming from OpenAI and not Open Router.

You definitely can build an LLM router with only the features you need (even the ones absent in OR!) for cheaper. Openrouter is 5% markup on all token usage. If you're a serious pay-per-use customer of AI, that's a lot of money.

Stripe has such a critical mass, I think SAAS builders don't even shop. It's just of course you use Stripe. It's a like a utility. I think even customers might be surprised to see a non-Stripe checkout when purchasing a SAAS. Might even get worried.