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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?

#41

Post by conradludgate »

For personal use, Luna-xhigh on the Plus subscription. I only ever hit my limits if I decide to use Sol or Astra for a bit more quality.

For work, given we pay API pricing anyway, I've been happy experimenting with K3-medium as my default, and now I'm planning on trying GLM 5.3 as well. Sol-medium is my fallback for my work purposes but I occasionally use Opus 4.8 as an additional reviewer.

I like the open weight models because much of my time at work is spent on security hardening (specifically, hardening my own service), and Sol/Opus keep snitching on me and blocking my prompts.

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

#42

Post by m0rde »

Enterprise pay as you go across a few vendors. But still cost conscious.

Defaulting to Sol Medium/Light for most planning and implementation I think is tricky or want more care in.

Luna Extra High for everything else (implementation, tedious take over my browser and do stuff).

I read all of its output tokens and lots of thinking tokens to understand the general flow of things, but only minimally look at code these days. I can't grok what Claude models speak and it's gotten worse. OAI models speak my kind of tech language I guess.

Light human review, some automated review.

Most work is for internal use.

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

#43

Post by seabrookmx »

Sonnet. It makes my token budget go further and I prefer to have the LLM churn away on rote work while I do the thinking. So while Opus and Fable are undoubtedly smarter, that doesn't materially affect _my_ workflow.

I'm not as up to date on the other vendors' models, but when I last used Gemini my feelings were similar between Pro and Flash.

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

#47

Post by r_lee »

o_m wrote: post #13

I 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…

I recently switched over to GPT from Claude once my subscription lapsed, it's too early to tell, but I do appreciate how more straight to the point Sol 5.6 seems to be, vs. the insane wordslop machine Opus tends to be.

It's really strange because when Opus 5 released, there were some that pointed this out, but a bunch simply said it was the best and as good as Fable etc etc.

but for me, it caused me to get very demotivated and avoid interacting with the model, at least when using Claude Code.

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

#48

Post by montroser »

It pains me to read these answers so far. Listen, for 99%+ of your web and mobile tasks, deepseek-v4.1-flash is all you need. It is blazing fast, super cheap, and quite proficient. It acts responsibly, has top-notch vision for evaluating its own UI work, and is far less smug and flowery than any of the Anthropic models.

For what it's worth, here's a take on its speed vs cost vs intelligence: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-1-flash

I can go all day and night with this thing with multiple sessions going, and I spend like $2 per day retail. With opencode-go, that fits within the $10/mo subscription, so that's what it ends up costing in real life.

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

#49

Post by Cakez0r »

I've been trying Grok 4.6 (High) alongside Claude Opus 5 (High). Grok is capable, but disappointing compared to Opus. My experience with Grok has also made me a little skeptical of benchmarks, because the two models benchmark similarly but it (subjectively) feels like there is quite a big capability gap between the two.

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

#50

Post by wenc »

o_m wrote: post #13

I 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…

Me too. Claude Opus 5's English is insufferable. Opus 4.6-4.8 was more reasonable.

I've moved to Codex 5.6-Sol. Much saner English, much better at execution, and gets stuff done in a matter-of-factly kind of way (Claude Code is a mess these days -- it gets things wrong and goes around in circles).

But I'm harness agnostic and am not locked in. I just keep my issues in Kata Tracker (https://www.katatracker.com/) and switch harnesses/model when I need to.

Being loyal to a particular model/harness seem unwise to me.

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