Yup - just like sibling comment said - my "low bar" is going to be whatever the best model is that isn't unreasonably costly/expensive.

Speed of model just isn't the bottleneck for me.

Before it I used Opus 4.1, and before that Opus 4.0 and before that Sonnet 4.0 - which each have been getting slightly better. It's not like Sonnet 4.5 is some crazy step function improvement (but the speed over Opus is definitely nice)

I think Opus 4.1 is still much better than Sonnet 4.5

If cost is not considered- absolutely. That being said sonnet 4.5 and using thinking where it makes sense feels like way more bang for your buck and usually good enough. I really don't use opus anymore

Yes? Because why should we settle for less now that it is available?

because engineering is the art of "good enough" and composer is clearly "good enough but a lot faster" which makes up for intelligence gaps in interesting ways

It's not good enough for a lot of us, though, clearly.

For me the bar for barely good enough is and always has been Codex. Before I found frontier models more trouble than they're worth. And there is still a massive amount of room to grow before I can genuinely say working with these tools is more enjoyable than frustrating for me and now I use them (and how I think they should work).

Not sure about parent, but my current bar is set by GPT-5 high in codex cli. Sonnet 4.5 doesn't quite get there in many of the use cases that are important to me. I still use sonnet for most less intelligence phases and tasks (until I get crunched by rate limits). But when it comes to writing the final coding prompt and the final verification prompt and executing a coder or a verifier that will execute and verify well it's GPT 5 high all the way. Even if sonnet is better at tool calling, GPT 5 High is just smarter and has better coding/engineering judgement and that difference is important to me. So I very much get the sentiment of not going below sonnet intelligence 4.5 for coding. It's where I draw the line too.