I use claude for most of what I do, and Fable is largely overkill for me and frequently burns through my Max plan's session credits in minutes (!) when just doing an initial mobile app planning with 4 agents. After I waited out the timeout period 6 hours later, and I picked up again, the cache had timed out so it burned through 2% of the session in less than a minute. Opus 4.8 is now my goto and I will be avoiding 5 until I see a reason to switch back. 4.8 is 'good enough' for what I need and has been a great value. It mostly gets things right. Most of what I do is web and mobile , largely cloud backend.
Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
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Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#2I have an 'ask' alias in my shell that just uses Haiku. I use it daily for pretty much everything
For more long work, I now use Fable to create a PLAN.md. I tell it to make a plan that will be executed by other models, and most of the time it ends up choosing Opus or Sonnet.
I didn't start doing this recently. Before that, I would just use the top model for everything. Splitting the work across different models depending on the task has helped a lot. They run faster, and I usually get much better results
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#3mimo-v2.5-free, mimo-v2.5, deepseek-flash in that order, honestly don’t even bother using qwen3.6-35b-a3b now unless i need uncensored tasks finished, mostly reverse engineering
most engineering tasks don’t require frontier llms
when they get stuck, then i consider moving up to more capable models
purchasing a claude plan seems widely unnecessary to me
the tasks they do better than the average engineer cut both ways: unless you have an existing portfolio of well written and designed work done pre-llms, it looks like you’re producing slop that pretends to be well designed
poor typography choices despite using the mode,
poor layout choices despite using popular CSS frameworks
etc
bad engineers will always be bad engineers
tools don’t make up for it
edit: a follow up to this— everyone is using eyebrows in their layouts and have no fucking clue why it was done to begin with
everyone has a status pill floating above their front page hero display text and its not fucking status related
so gross
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#4opusplan, for the same reasons.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#5Astra low for pretty much everything gets me through the work week with a bit to spare on the 5x max plan.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#6I'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.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#7Claude, not necessarily because it's better. I find deepseek flash to be of similar quality. But because it's so heavily subsidized.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#8I 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)
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#9- Default: Codex with Terra Max (because it's crazy cheap)
- Preferred: Claude Code with Opus 5 Medium
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#10Qwen 3.8 flash-next or Gemma 26B because I care about responsible and sustainable usage of LLM's.