The session you cannot take with you
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Inference APIs are moving toward non-portable session state, locking users into single providers.
The article argues inference APIs increasingly return provider-bound state that breaks session portability. Features like encrypted reasoning tokens, server-side compaction, hidden search results, and encrypted subagent communications create opaque state that only the original provider can interpret. The author proposes five tests for session ownership (inspection, export, replay, audit, deletion) and advocates for seven rules for portable inference APIs, including canonical local event logs, explicit storage, inspectable compaction, and full-fidelity tool logs. The piece also critiques distillation policies that forbid competitors from learning from outputs while the labs themselves train on public data.
What commenters are saying
Commenters broadly agreed with the article's concerns about lock-in. One noted the importance of open-weights models for perpetuity, citing GPT-4o's retirement. Another pushed back, questioning whether the complaints are self-serving from a harness developer and noting legitimate reasons for hiding reasoning (citing role-confusion attacks). A third commenter criticized charging for opaque reasoning tokens and suggested providers should offer session IDs instead of requiring full history resends. One commenter recently switched to Pi from Claude Code, citing transparency and the ability to easily switch models. Another suggested attaching full sessions to PRs as future archeology.