Pattern: Named Model Tiers Are Becoming the Primary Product Surface, Not the Model

OpenAI·high signal

OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 as three separately-named products (Sol, Terra, Luna) rather than one model with a reasoning-effort dial, and GitHub gated them by SKU on day one. Anthropic did the equivalent with Opus/Sonnet/Haiku plus effort levels; Copilot now surfaces all of them in the same picker. The pattern: model *selection* is being moved from an infrastructure decision made once to a per-task decision made constantly, and the tools are racing to make that choice legible in the UI. The builder consequence is that routing policy — which tier gets which class of task — is becoming a durable, versionable artifact of your setup, not an afterthought.