Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading the comments here drives home an industry wide problem with these tools: people are just using the latest and most expensive models because they can , and because they’re cargo-culting. This is perhaps the first time that software has had this kind of problem, and coders are not exactly demonstrating great discretionary decision making. I’ve been using Anthropic models exclusively for the last month on a larg…
I think it heavily depends on how you're using it. If you understand your codebase and you're using it like "build a function that does x in y file" then smaller/cheaper models are great. But if you're saying "hey build this relatively complex feature following the 30,000 foot view spec in this markdown doc" then Haiku doesn't work (unless your "complex feature" is just an api endpoint and some UI that consumes it).
I basically never just yolo large code changes, and use my taste and experience to guide the tools along. For this, Haiku is perfectly fine in nearly all circumstances.