Basing a programming model leadership shift solely on an AI price and intelligence index snapshot is too narrow; it misses the full operational picture.
Real-world adoption means accounting for switching costs and integration effort, not just raw price on a specific date.
If a team built their entire workflow around Claude Sonnet 3.5, moving to 3.7 or 4.0 is a substantial re-engineering trigger, requiring updates to custom prompts and integrations, like migrating a whole enterprise system from Windows Server 2016 to 2022.
That operational friction can keep an older model as a de facto leader longer than a simple price change might suggest.
We need to factor in the total cost of ownership, not just the price ticker.