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Developers are choosing older AI models

augmentcode.com

41–50 of 179 posts

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#41
post #14

We tried GPT-5 for a RAG use case, and found that it performs worse than 4.1. We reverted and didn't look back.

Can you elaborate on that? In which part of the RAG pipeline did GPT-4.1 perform better? I would expect GPT-5 to perform better on longer context tasks, especially when it comes to understanding the pre-filtered results and reasoning about them

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#42
post #14

We tried GPT-5 for a RAG use case, and found that it performs worse than 4.1. We reverted and didn't look back.

Can you elaborate on that? In which part of the RAG pipeline did GPT-4.1 perform better? I would expect GPT-5 to perform better on longer context tasks, especially when it comes to understanding the pre-filtered results and reasoning about them

For large context (up to 100K tokens in some cases). We found that GPT-5: a) has worse instruction following; doesn't follow the system prompt b) produces very long answers which resulted in a bad ux c) has 125K context window so extreme cases resulted in an error

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#43
post #22

To the authors of the site, please know that your current "Cookiebot by Usercentrics" is old and pretty much illegal. You shouldn't need to click 5 times to "Reject all" if accepting all is one click. Newer versions have a "Deny" button.

Weirdly this site also requested bluetooth access on my mac.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#44
post #28
post #3

For development use cases, I switched to Sonnet 4.5 and haven't looked back. I mean, sure, sometimes I also use GPT-5 (and mini) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (and Flash), and also Cerebras Code just switched to providing GLM 4.6 instead of the previous Qwen3 Coder so those as well, but in general the frontier models are pretty good for development and I wouldn't have much reason to use something like Sonnet 4 or 3.7 or whateve…

I have canceled my Claude Max subscription because Sonnet 4.5 is just too unreliable. For the rest of the month I'm using Opus 4.1 which is much better but seems to have much lower usage limits than before Sonnet 4.5 was released. When I hit 4.1 Opus limits I'm using Codex. I will probably go through with the Codex pro subscription.

Definitely do it. You get a lot of deep research, access to GPT5 Pro, Sora and the Codex limits are MUCH higher.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#45
post #39

Tangential to this: what are the most reliable benchmarks for LLM in coding these days?

I found Terminal-Bench [0] to be the most relevant for me, even for tasks that go far outside the terminal. It's been very interesting to see tools climb up there, and it matches my own experimentation, that they generally get the most out of Sonnet (and even those that use a mix of models like Warp, typically default to Sonnet).

[0] https://www.tbench.ai/?ch=1

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#46
post #43
post #22

To the authors of the site, please know that your current "Cookiebot by Usercentrics" is old and pretty much illegal. You shouldn't need to click 5 times to "Reject all" if accepting all is one click. Newer versions have a "Deny" button.

Weirdly this site also requested bluetooth access on my mac.

That would be the browser fingerprinting in action. I often get a lot of requests to use widevine on ddg's browser on android (which informs one about it) for I suspect similar reasons.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#47
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly this site also requested bluetooth access on my mac.

That would be the browser fingerprinting in action. I often get a lot of requests to use widevine on ddg's browser on android (which informs one about it) for I suspect similar reasons.

Interesting, I'm on Brave and have never had a site request bluetooth access before, so much so that I'd never even granted Brave bluetooth access, hence why it popped up as a system notification this time around.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#48
I usually switch models depending on the situation, for simpler stuff, I lean toward 4o since it’s faster to get answers.

But when things get more complex, I prefer GPT-5, talking with it often gives me fresh ideas and new perspectives.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#49
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on that? In which part of the RAG pipeline did GPT-4.1 perform better? I would expect GPT-5 to perform better on longer context tasks, especially when it comes to understanding the pre-filtered results and reasoning about them

For large context (up to 100K tokens in some cases). We found that GPT-5: a) has worse instruction following; doesn't follow the system prompt b) produces very long answers which resulted in a bad ux c) has 125K context window so extreme cases resulted in an error

ChatGPT when using 5 or 5-Thinking doesn’t even follow my “custom instructions” on the web version. It’s a serious downgrade compared to the prior generation of models.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#50
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on that? In which part of the RAG pipeline did GPT-4.1 perform better? I would expect GPT-5 to perform better on longer context tasks, especially when it comes to understanding the pre-filtered results and reasoning about them

For large context (up to 100K tokens in some cases). We found that GPT-5: a) has worse instruction following; doesn't follow the system prompt b) produces very long answers which resulted in a bad ux c) has 125K context window so extreme cases resulted in an error

Interesting. https://www.robert-glaser.de/prompts-as-programs-in-gpt-5/ claims GPT-5 has amazing!1!! instruction following. Is your use-case very different, or is this yet another case of "developer A got lucky, developer B tested more things"?
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