I think you kind of answered this in the post though. "I want somebody to have used the thing" is dogfooding. and it's probably the only quality signal left that can't be generated in 30 minutes.
that's the loop though. if GPT does the screening, people learn to write for GPT. once that loop exists, why would the company selling the filter want it gone?
Yep. They built the quote engine before they built the pricing page. "OpenClaw" in your git history is enough to kick you off quota and onto metered billing.
the thing is it doesn't even feel like mortgaging. shipping, features going out, everything looks fine. then something breaks and you realize you can't debug your own code without asking the model again.
not just the cache though. every time you stop and come back, it basically reloads the whole session. if you just let it keep going, it counts like one smooth run. you hit the wall faster for actually checking its work.
tbh ~1-3% PPL hit from Q4_K_M stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. the bottleneck is the 48 hours of guessing llama.cpp flags and chat template bugs before the ecosystem catches up. you are doing unpaid QA.
IMO it doesn't flatten design into one thing. it splits it. cheap obvious work at scale, and a way smaller premium tier for real authorship. the middle is what actually gets crushed.