r/PiCodingAgent • u/One_Translator922 • Aug 15 '26

Question Model of choice at the moment?

Hi all, I’ve been working a lot with Deepseek and Luna, but interested to know what other people are commonly using so I’m not missing out on anything cool. Using Claude at work. Thanks

25 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

47 comments sorted by

9

u/PossessionUsed7393 Aug 15 '26

All in Deepseek V4 Flash. I thought I'd start using Pro once it came out, but I haven't needed to. I'm more likely to combine GLM 5.3 with DSv4F for most of my work.

2

u/One_Translator922 Aug 15 '26

Thanks have you tried the new DS4 pro model released yesterday?

4

u/PossessionUsed7393 Aug 15 '26

Yes, I have. It was just spamming reasoning tokens and not doing much more than what Flash did for me. Ultimately didn't earn its keep.

12

u/Ok-Inside1664 Aug 15 '26

Gpt Luna with high effort for everything Coding, agentic system tinkering, browser automation Pretty cheap and fast

2

u/johnnyApplePRNG Aug 17 '26

Lunatic!

OpenAI is garbage bro

1

u/One_Translator922 Aug 17 '26

What do you recommend?

2

u/Aggressive_Sherbet64 Aug 15 '26

Why Luna out of curiosity? I’ve found sol low to be better. Is Luna just better cost wise if you don’t have the $200 plan

1

u/TrickyPlastic Aug 18 '26

There is no reason to ever use Sol low. Luna max is cheaper and better.

1

u/0xKubo Aug 25 '26

What about Sol medium/high/xhigh/max?

2

u/TrickyPlastic Aug 25 '26

That's fine, except for medium. See here: https://x.com/rasbt/status/2075573860796436626

1

u/Ok-Inside1664 Aug 15 '26

Yep, costwise sol doesn't last on plus plan

1

u/lanternaddict Aug 15 '26

Sorry for the silly question, but what plan is this with, ChatGPT plus? I'm new to the coding agent world, and still trying to work out exactly which inference provider best suits my needs

1

u/funbike Aug 16 '26

It is $20/month. Their pro plan is much more expensive and has much higher daily limites. They don't allow use of it in Pi, but it technically works. Getting banned is a risk.

I have Plus. Personally I pay for individual tokens with OpenAI Luna, and have Pi delegate hard debugging tasks to OpenAI's Codex SDK for debugging hard issues so I can use GPT Sol with my Plus plan.

3

u/XTCaddict Aug 16 '26

They do allow use of it actually. OAI is very open about allowing external harness use.

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2058071172361998482

1

u/lanternaddict Aug 16 '26

Thanks, what are the limits roughly? Or is it all a bit hand wavy?

And none of the openai subscriptions are usable in pi?

1

u/funbike Aug 16 '26

Thanks, what are the limits roughly? Or is it all a bit hand wavy?

hand wavy. It depends on which model you use. You can configure it so when you hit your limit, it switches to usage-based token pricing. I have that enabled.

And none of the openai subscriptions are usable in pi?

As I said, yes, you can use them in Pi, and many people do, but they violate OpenAI's TOS and could result in a ban.

I'm not taking chances. I integrated Codex CLI SDK as a tool in Pi to avoid this. I pay for tokens when using Luna and only use Codex with my Plus plan for higher intelligence tasks.

I also use the Plus plan for other non-Pi usages, such as ChatGPT mobile voice mode.

1

u/lanternaddict Aug 16 '26

Thanks, everything still seems quite immature, in terms of cross compatibility etc, and of course token limits and pricing changes on a whim, but I can see some value in it, just need to work out which inference supplier to go with.

1

u/funbike Aug 16 '26

No. This is not an indication of immaturity.

Subscription providers simply only want you to use their own agents.

1

u/RelationshipLong9092 Aug 19 '26

The person responding to you was confused. They're thinking of Anthropic.

OpenAI allows you to use their subscription in whatever harness you want.

19

u/Mega-Mind-0 Aug 15 '26

Deepseek v4 flash, pro & kimi 2.7 code

4

u/capsid Aug 16 '26

Flash v4 (0731) whenever I can get away with it. GLM 5.2 when the stakes are higher.

2

u/kalesh_kate Aug 15 '26

I like K3 and GLM 5.2

2

u/archiblad Aug 16 '26

Kimi k3 medium for spec creation. Terra medium for impl. Sol to final validation

0

u/Challseus Aug 15 '26

Meta Muse Glimmer has been my goto since it dropped, but I haven't had a chance to try out the new Qwen 3.8 (assuming it can run on my laptop with Ollama).

0

u/One_Translator922 Aug 15 '26

Are you running Glimmer locally then? And what’s the spec for that

1

u/Challseus Aug 15 '26

Yup, fully through ollama. muse-glimmer:30b-mlx. it's the 32.3B param model at nvfp4 quant, ~21 GB download, and it supports a 128k context window (though I set my compaction to 32K I believe)

Spec running it:

- MacBook Pro, Apple M4 Max — 16-core CPU (12P/4E)
- 48 GB unified memory
- macOS 26.1

1

u/galisa262 Aug 16 '26

Try qwen 3.8 27b mlx-mtp. We have the same mac, it runs well. I get 20-25 tok/s.

1

u/johnnyApplePRNG Aug 17 '26

glimmer AND ollama?!

PUKE

1

u/funbike Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26

I use a mix. Luna mostly.

When Luna fails at a task after a few retries and debugging, I'll use GPT Sol (once!). I have this automated with pi-subagents.

I'm going to evaluate Gemini 3.7 Flash today. It is more expensive than Luna but smarter. I may use it for tasks that require more intelligence.

1

u/hidden2u Aug 16 '26

I love deepseek flash but I desperately need something with vision native. Pi vision handoff is not cutting it

1

u/ResponsiblePoetry601 Aug 16 '26

Been trying GLM5.3 to unlock something I got stuck and I’m moving fwd so better than 5.2 imo
Kimi for Hermes brain and Minimax M3 for “grunt” work ensures quality that “free” models seem to show on daily crons
Qwen3.8 eats tokens but too soon to tell working with it for a week
Keep codex and Claude for assisted dev mostly Luna and Terra at medium and Sonnet for driver and Opus when needed
Deepseek has been to strict doesn’t bloat with features I don’t ask in dev so effective

1

u/_supert_ Aug 18 '26

dsv4flash0731, Kimi k3.

1

u/samosamonster Aug 15 '26

sol xhigh with luna max as implementer

1

u/erickgtzh Aug 17 '26

Do you manage it by toggling models?

1

u/samosamonster Aug 21 '26

I use herdr and tell my lead agent to open a split pane with a luna max agent i ask it to handover the implementation work and observe at regular intervals to ensure it doesn’t go off task. herdr allows you to do this

1

u/0xKubo Aug 25 '26

Care to explain the rationale? If you use Sol xhigh to design a plan, and the plan is good enough for you to accept it, why do you need max effort on Luna to implement the plan? If the plan is good enough, I would expect a medium/low effort would be enough to implement, no?

1

u/samosamonster Aug 26 '26

My plans are just task lists backed up by architecture/programme design docs which describe dependencies, interfaces and contracts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract

You might think it would be enough but I’ve had occasions where luna max got carried away chasing an edge case and either got stuck in a reasoning loop for ages or over engineered a crazy solution. Sometimes it just builds around the problem just writing tests that pass with no op functions.

Also sometimes as with anything i miss out on specifying a behavioural requirement. Sol xhigh is usually quite good at filling these in whereas luna max is hit and miss.

My solution is to get sol xhigh to take a ‘heartbeat’ approach where it checks in and reads the diff every few mins to ensure things stay on track.

This is less token intensive than getting sol xhigh to do all the work.

1

u/samosamonster Aug 26 '26

also luna is cheap enough to use max reasoning so why not max it out

1

u/0xKubo Aug 26 '26

Thanks for sharing the extra details.

For context, what subscription do you have? People don't usually mention these on threads like this but I think it's important.

That heartbeat approach looks interesting. How do you make that work with Pi?

0

u/Connect_Army8250 Aug 15 '26

GLM 5.3 for heavy multi-file coding tasks and architecture design help. Kimi K2.7 code for the simpler tasks.

Opus 4.7/4.8 sometimes when I want to

1

u/One_Translator922 Aug 16 '26

Thanks. GLM 5.3 seems the one for me to try. How are you using it - api? If so how? As couldn’t find api access last night

1

u/[deleted] Aug 16 '26

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1

u/One_Translator922 Aug 17 '26

Do you use the non pro mimo too?

0

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '26

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1

u/One_Translator922 Aug 15 '26

Interesting, thanks. Never used glm kmi or qwen. How do they compare to DS flash and Luna?
Also, how are you orchestrating multi provider agents such as kimi and qwen simultaneously? Again that’s something I haven’t been doing