most engineering tasks don’t require frontier llms
when they get stuck, then i consider moving up to more capable models
purchasing a claude plan seems widely unnecessary to me
the tasks they do better than the average engineer cut both ways: unless you have an existing portfolio of well written and designed work done pre-llms, it looks like you’re producing slop that pretends to be well designed
poor typography choices despite using the mode,
poor layout choices despite using popular CSS frameworks
etc
bad engineers will always be bad engineers
tools don’t make up for it
edit: a follow up to this— everyone is using eyebrows in their layouts and have no fucking clue why it was done to begin with
everyone has a status pill floating above their front page hero display text and its not fucking status related
so gross
Astra low on the $200/mo "20x Pro" plan gets me through a single day.
- like a fancy auto complete (here are some stub methods, they should do X, fill them in)
- using fairly detailed plans and test harnesses, so blowing up the world is hard
The 3.X Flash family have been fairly capable models, and the selling point for me is just raw speed. Gemini is noticeably faster than the competition, about 3-4x, and I just get work done faster with it.
That said I'm keeping an eye on Open Weights. DS4 Flash was good until price hikes, and finding a provider that serves at high speed and without quantisation at the prior price is tricky.
- Preferred: Claude Code with Opus 5 Medium
I also don't want to use the Claude Code and Codex agent harnesses. The good thing with Codex subscription is that it can be used in other harnesses, unlike Claude. As far as I know, only Anthropic has this restriction.
unbeatable price/intel ratio per M tokens:
$0.10 (input)
$0.20 (output)
$0.002 (cached-input)
Granted, yesterday I threw a few tasks to Astra which the former 2 botches; it produced clean, correct solutions quickly, so pending further eval, this may take over.
IMO unless it's a mechanical tasks, it's worth it to use carefully -crafted queries on the more expensive models, than iterate through messier solutions on the cheaper ones.
For my personal stuff, I'm on a small $20 plan, so I need to use tokens conservatively. I was very rarely exceeding limits until I built a Dark Software Factory. It's not as efficient at token use.
At work I have a $100 plan that I rarely exceed so I use Opus. I have access to Fable too, and I used it a lot while it was new, but I don't find it improves most of my work by too much.
I also use Sol as a secondary for my personal work. I pay for it because I like ChatGPT for various work-loads. I like to let sol write plans for me, it does a better job at certain tasks, and it saves me some Claude tokens.
mariocesar•29m ago
For more long work, I now use Fable to create a PLAN.md. I tell it to make a plan that will be executed by other models, and most of the time it ends up choosing Opus or Sonnet.
I didn't start doing this recently. Before that, I would just use the top model for everything. Splitting the work across different models depending on the task has helped a lot. They run faster, and I usually get much better results
sourcecodeplz•9m ago