The models you interact with through the API (as opposed to chat UIs) are held stable and let you specify reasoning effort, so if you use a client that takes API keys, you might be able to solve both of those problems.
> Incidentally, one of the reasons I haven't gotten much into subscribing to these services, is that I always feel like they're triaging how many reasoning tokens to give me, or AB testing a different model... I never feel I can trust that I interact with the same model.
That's what websites have been doing for ages. Just like you can't step twice in the same river, you can't use the same version of Google Search twice, and never could.
Incidentally, one of the reasons I haven't gotten much into subscribing to these services, is that I always feel like they're triaging how many reasoning tokens to give me, or AB testing a different model... I never feel I can trust that I interact with the same model.