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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?

#21

Post by codazoda »

I use Sonnit for my personal work and Opus for my professional work.

For my personal stuff, I'm on a small $20 plan, so I need to use tokens conservatively. I was very rarely exceeding limits until I built a Dark Software Factory. It's not as efficient at token use. So, I use Sonnit over Opus here.

At work I have a $100 plan that I rarely exceed so I use Opus. I have access to Fable too, and I did use it a lot while it was new, but I don't find it improves most of my work by too much. I do mostly bug fixing across several hundred repositories with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, mostly written by humans over the past 20-years. These projects interact with each other so I run claude from the root of my sandbox (I was nervous to try this but I'm not looking back now).

I also use Sol as a secondary for my personal work. I pay for it because I like to talk to ChatGPT on the web. Since I already have the subscription, I let Sol write plans for me. It does a better job at certain tasks and it saves me some Claude tokens. Maybe I should consider Terra for the task, but I don't run up against my usage limits for the little bit I use it.

I'm trying to use Gemma 4 12b for some workloads but I haven't mastered the model yet. It's still very experimental for me. I can get work from it but it takes a lot of hand-holding. For local models, however, it's all I have the RAM for.

Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

#23

Post by jbonatakis »

ewindisch wrote: post #11
alstonite wrote: post #5

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.

I honestly don’t think I could blow through a 20x plan in a day if I was trying. What are you doing that uses so many tokens?

Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

#24

Post by oduis »

I like AI more on the short leash, giving it specific agents tasks, one at a time (centaur mode). I found GPT 5.6 LUNA to be astonishingly capable. Plus, it so fast, that it does not block my flow of throughts, like the more capable but slower models often do. And it is so cheap that I do not use Ollama local models anymore. Luna is far more capable, and so cheap that the energy prices here in Germany eat the gains of local hosting ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

#25

Post by mariocesar »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #18
mariocesar wrote: post #2

I 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?

To ask for web search, simple commands and research, or passing logs to analyze it's more than enough

Here is the script https://github.com/mariocesar/dotfiles/blob/main/common/.loc...

Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

#27

Post by admiralrohan »

bellowsgulch wrote: post #3

mimo-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:…

Where are you getting mimo-v2.5 for free?

Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

#28

Post by time0ut »

If I had to pick just one, these days it’s Composer. It is just a cheap, fast, surgical workhorse. My workflow uses other models as well for various phases: Opus for planning, Sonnet for review, etc.

I prefer Cursor at this point just because of Composer. Claude Code is passable but the lack of a good, fast, cheap workhorse sucks. Sonnet and Haiku aren’t it.

I also do like Codex and Sol, Terra, and Luna. They are decent but I don’t find they stand out enough to use over the others.

Additionally, I have not tried Astra and found Fable to really not worth the cost for the tasks I do.

Finally, the latest Grok is actually a beast of a model, but expensive enough to not be a stand out.

Re: Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

#29

Post by shelled »

ZAI/GLM because a friend has generously shared an API key. They have other subscriptions and also a lot more from their employer.

A day ago I activated Google AI Pro free via Google's tie-up with a local company (I do pay for this company's product though and it's anything but costly). Now I will use this too.

No other reasons to pick these, or not picking anything else.

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