Astra low for pretty much everything gets me through the work week with a bit to spare on the 5x max plan.
How are you managing your tokenomics so well?
Astra low on the $200/mo "20x Pro" plan gets me through a single day.
Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
11–20 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#12Glm-5.3-flash for me. I like faster models because I stay involved all the way through. I don't delegate full control to the agent because it's harder to understand the end result that way.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#13I used to main Claude, but I can't stand how it writes. I feel like I'm wasting too much time trying to decipher the output. Adding writing rules does not seem to work. Now I use GPT 5.6 Terra high fast mode, with Luna for everything else. I might consider using Sol for planning. I can't stand using Sol or smarter models for coding, because they will eventually try to rewrite everything in the codebase.
I also don't want to use the Claude Code and Codex agent harnesses. The good thing with Codex subscription is that it can be used in other harnesses, unlike Claude. As far as I know, only Anthropic has this restriction.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#14I'm using a lot of gpt-5.6-Luna and glm-5.3-flash. Astra is really fantastic but it's too expensive. I average about 50-90B/tok/mo.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#15Muse Spark 1.3 Contribs
unbeatable price/intel ratio per M tokens:
$0.10 (input)
$0.20 (output)
$0.002 (cached-input)
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#16I was using various open weights models until glm-5.3-flash came out recently. It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest. I've assigned it to all my agents across my harness and it's getting the job done. Still needs a good steer every now and then, but a great work horse.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#17I'm using a lot of gpt-5.6-Luna and glm-5.3-flash. Astra is really fantastic but it's too expensive. I average about 50-90B/tok/mo.
i like Luna but only until 130k context, over that it becomes dumb.
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#18I 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 depen…
i can not believe you really use Haiku?
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#19I use gemma 4 12B and Qwen 3.8 9B
Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
#20Sol High-Xhigh, and Opus 5.
Granted, yesterday I threw a few tasks to Astra which the former 2 botches; it produced clean, correct solutions quickly, so pending further eval, this may take over.
IMO unless it's a mechanical tasks, it's worth it to use carefully -crafted queries on the more expensive models, than iterate through messier solutions on the cheaper ones.
edit: maybe not. Astra has imitated Fable, and appears unusable for biology due to safeguards.