so it goes to the trashcan

If an LLM is often going to be wrong anyway, then being able to try prompts quickly and then iterate on those prompts, could possibly be more valuable than a slow higher quality output.

Ad absurdum, if it could injest and work on an entire project in milliseconds, then it has mucher geater value to me, than a process which might take a day to do the same, even if the likelihood of success is also strongly affected.

It simply enables a different method of interactive working.

Or it could supply 3 different suggestions in-line while working on something, rather than a process which needs to be explicitly prompted and waited on.

Latency can have critical impact on not just user experience but the very way tools are used.

Now, will I try Grok? Absolutely not, but that's a personal decision due to not wanting anything to do with X, rather than a purely rational decision.

They reduce the costs tough !

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1958854561579638960

Fast is good for tool use and synthesizing the results.

For autocompleting simple functions (string manipulation, function definitions, etc), the quality bar is pretty easy to hit, and speed is important.

If you're just vibe coding, then yeah, you want quality. But if you know what you're doing, I find having a dumber fast model is often nicer than a slow smart model that you still need to correct a bit, because it's easier to stay in flow state.

With the slow reasoning models, the workflow is more like working with another engineer, where you have to review their code in a PR

I use Opus 4.1 exclusively in Claude Code but then I also use zen-mcp server to get both gpt5 and gemini-2.5-pro to review the code and then Opus 4.1 responds. I will usually have eyeballed the code somewhere in the middle here but I'm not fully reviewing until this whole dance is done.

I mean, I obviously agree with you in that I've chosen the slowest models available at every turn here, but my point is I would be very excited if they also got faster because I am using a lot of extra inference to buy more quality before I'm touching the code myself.

At least this comment was written fast.

It's not long enough for you to context switch to something else, but long enough to be annoying and these wait times add up during the whole day.

It also discourages experimentation if you know that every prompt will potentially take multiple minutes to finish. If it instead finished in seconds then you could iterate faster. This would be especially valuable in the frontend world where you often tweak your UI code many times until you're satisfied with it.

We already know that in most software domains, fast (as in, getting it done faster) is better than 100% correct.

I'm getting 30-50% larger code changes in per day now. Yesterday I plumbed six slightly mechanical, but still major changes through our schema, several microservice layers, API client libraries, and client code. I wrote down the change sites ahead of time to track progress: 54. All requiring individual business logic. This would have been tedious without tab complete.

And that's not the only thing I did yesterday.

I wouldn't trust these tools with non-developers, but in our hands they're an exoskeleton. I like them like I like my vim movements.

A similar analogy can be made for the AI graphics design and editing models. They're extremely good time saving tools, but they still require a human that knows what they're doing to pilot them.