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- Hacker News
- I think for me stuff peaked around Opus 4.7, I was leaning heavily on the model with paired supervision from reviewing the output manually every step of the way. Ever since that things got a little more complicated and in an unsustainable pace for me, I am trying to remove myself from the equation and build verifiable and reliable tests with quick feedback loops that let frontier models run autonomously but in all honesty not seeing it scale well, I need to take a step back and reassess if the trade off was worthwhile. Frontier models are being incredible at making me feel like they passed my tests only to eventually reveal some tech debt that forces me to take large pivots. It seems the speed is sexy but the results are questionable, models may have hit a limit in my workflow and I think harness engineering is more important than anything. Would love to hear feedback on this take and if others have experienced similar things and what they did to overcome this. (Context would be solo founder bootstrapping greenfield work with full autonomy and sometimes more room for rapid iteration)by hmokiguess
- Almost exclusively Fable at xhigh. I sometimes run out of tokens, but most weeks it's not a problem. The limiting factor is by far how fast I can push understanding of what was made into my brain, and I find that I waste time using Opus. It makes annoying mistakes, and it makes assumptions that are often wrong instead of actually verifying. And it can't write so I can understand it.
- Given the tremendous variety of answers here, one has to wonder how much it matters. Reminds me of when you ask a bunch of motorcyclists what oil to useby beej71
- I've found good success with the new Gemini models on Antigravity. Granted I use my models either:
- 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.
by vallerie - For personal needs I use a local Qwen3.8-Next-Flash setup on a GB10 cluster. For work, Github Copilot with either GPT 5 mini or toss up between Opus/Sol depending on the complexity of the task.
Used to pay for a Claude 20x plan and did everything in Opus, but I hate how it talks now and recent events (OAI scooping, Anthropic's spying, third party Chinese model hosts stealing and selling credentials) have really pushed me towards local AI for personal needs. Am not allowed to use Chinese models for work even if self-hosted so not much choice there.
by hgoel - I have “unlimited” (but metered) tokens at work. I was primarily a Claude (Opus and Fable) user until Astra came out.
Astra’s outputs are much more concise while being similarly accurate, they seem more information dense. It’s also extremely fast and doesn’t have to “go check instead of answering from memory” if the answer is already in context, or dig super deep into a project before answering.
It’s honestly refreshing to work with Astra after being basically burned out from reading Claude’s responses.
It’s not perfect. It’s just as “mid” for professional SWE work as Opus/Fable, regularly making incorrect assumptions/generalizations, requiring steering in large codebases, and being incapable of making reasonable long-term software design decisions on its own in complex projects.
by asd88 - It pains me to read these answers so far. Listen, for 99%+ of your web and mobile tasks, deepseek-v4.1-flash is all you need. It is blazing fast, super cheap, and quite proficient. It acts responsibly, has top-notch vision for evaluating its own UI work, and is far less smug and flowery than any of the Anthropic models.
For what it's worth, here's a take on its speed vs cost vs intelligence: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-1-flash
I can go all day and night with this thing with multiple sessions going, and I spend like $2 per day retail. With opencode-go, that fits within the $10/mo subscription, so that's what it ends up costing in real life.
by montroser - I used to main Claude, but I can't stand how it writes. I feel like I'm wasting too much time trying to decipher the output. Adding writing rules does not seem to work. Now I use GPT 5.6 Terra high fast mode, with Luna for everything else. I might consider using Sol for planning. I can't stand using Sol or smarter models for coding, because they will eventually try to rewrite everything in the codebase.
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.
by o_m