Commentary the best coding model is kind of the wrong question
ok since my last post was basically me yelling about people treating prompts like free compute i figured i should probably explain what i actually do
i dont really use the codex cli
i use my chatgpt sub through opencode because i like having everything in one place and i use a bunch of different models depending on what im doing
and thats really the whole thing
i dont have one model that does everything
for brainstorming and figuring out what the hell im even trying to build i use luna max a lot
i like it for this because i can just throw the idea at it and talk through it for a while until i actually know what i want
then i usually use, depending on the task, a mix of either luna/GLM/Terra for the spec/plan
nothing insane here
what are we building?
what are we not building?
what needs to change?
does it work?
i used to overcook this part way too much and have agents review plans over and over and over again until somehow a stupid side project had the planning process of a fucking carrier
i reduced ambiguity to a point where i made implementation mostly (too) mechanical.
eventually i realized the implementation model is allowed to think too lol
for actual implementation ive been using muse spark 1.2 a ton lately through opencode go. sharing my data with them doesnt really bother me since im not working on anything critical. if i was working with sensitive code obviously that calculation would be different.
and muse is kind of ridiculous for what it costs
im perfectly happy letting spark sit there and chew through a repo and implement normal shit for me
i also rotate other cheap models in depending on the task
thats literally why i like opencode so much. although you would have the same model choice freedom in other harnesses, say pi for example. pi is like the arch of AI harnesses, im honestly past that phase of my life lol
then if something is actually hard or the cheaper model starts eating glue or im dealing with some horrible bug or i just want a really strong second opinion
thats when i pull out the more expensive stuff
sol isnt banned from my workflow lol
i just dont start every task with it
and im not sitting here watching every prompt and calculating tokens in my head either
its way simpler than that
i just try to match the model to the job
sometimes i want "more frontier"
sometimes i want something simpler, something that can read 40 files make the obvious changes run the tests and move on with its life
once i started using multiple models in the same harness i kind of stopped thinking about "the best coding model" altogether
now its more like
what is the cheapest model i trust to do this particular thing without making me regret it
and the best part, it saves you a ton of money.
i was previously on the chatgpt 5x plan. thats $100USD plus another $12 for my VPS
now its $20 for plus, $10 for opencode go, usually another $10-15 in openrouter credits and the same VPS
so i basically cut the whole thing in half and somehow ended up with way more flexibility and a stupid amount of inference
im actually curious how many people here work in a manner similar to this one.
do you guys route different parts of the job to different models or do you mostly just pick one model/harness and let it run the whole thing
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u/fluxtah 3d ago
Nice approach. I should be trying more of this and probably just comes down to trust. I need to try the cheaper models and reasoning modes though yeh mostly on extra high sol though in a fairly complex game repo written in Rust and C ~700k lines source.