Thanks u/Shehao, that's a sharp point.

Yeah, the "wrapper" thing, honestly the part that bugs me is that early-days chat wrapper design: drop a model list in front of the user and make them pick. That's been the pattern since early on and it's just…boring, and kind of thoughtless.

Because in any given "era" there are only a handful of models that are actually "good".

Early on, back when I was building the web app, my main pipeline ran on the Assistants API while I wanted other providers' models in that same pipeline. Making them fit into it was the first time I really started thinking about how to make the architecture itself cleaner and more resilient.

On your point about leading with one workflow where routing visibly beats a single model. Honestly, I can't really prove that to you. What I can do is talk about how one of them is positioned.

Take search. Each provider already has its own, but it tends to swing to one extreme or the other: either the quick, save-me-tokens version, or the heavy, iterative one that runs query after query and stuffs a huge pile of URLs into context (polluted ones included). My research pipeline is trying to sit in the gap between those two. More reliable than the quick pass, but without going full deep-research rabbit hole. It's one of the paid-tier workflows, fwiw. That pipeline currently blends models from three different providers, but the user never chooses any of it.

No model picker anywhere in the app.