Codex has been an excellent workhorse - doesn't feel like I have to dance around the guardrails, doesn't lose _everything_ when it compacts, and doesn't litter the workspace with a million and one planning to plan files.
I used to rely on Fable for research when it was first out, today it doesn’t seem to be much better than Opus, and it uses up the quota exceptionally fast - 1h Fable in a single short session, and there’s little left for Opus to hit the 5h limit in a second session. With Opus I get about 3-5h of relaxed use with a couple subagents to save the context, but there’s usually quite some disagreement between the subagents and orchestrator - Claude does some model routing with default agents and picks Haiku and Sonnet for subtasks - only later to disagree with them and redo the work - and burn extra tokens. With Claude, it’s really either Opus or Fable if you want some quality.
That said, their marketing is exceptionally effective. Virtually all nontech folks consider only Claude.
Codex handles the bulk of the actual coding, although sometimes Opus comes into play for UI related tasks.
You may use the official Codex plug in for Claude Code by OpenAI [1] to let Claude Code delegate task to Codex, it conserves CC usage.
I've had great luck with the ds flash v4, paired with prime-agent for the harness--I like the results a lot. And you get to see thinking tokens.
I haven't liked the model as much in opencode.
Sol & luna have been great everywhere. sol plans, luna builds.
I also like prime-agent's way of handling sessions better than any other harness i've used. You can run multiple agents from one instance, although the scoping could be better.
But they can interact with past sessions, so preserving context isn't as important all the time. I just tell them to search for [thing] in another session.
It seems to have no problem with all the skills and things the other harnesses are using. I use superpowers and ponytail a lot.
It's my daily driver now. I like it better than opencode. But it doesn't ask permission. So I put it in a VM.
And it can communicate, unlike the gobbledygook that comes out of Claude.
Their cache read costs are $0.50 per million, or 25% of the cost of uncached reads.
The industry standard is a 90% discount, so cache costs you 10% of uncached. So that means 5.6 Sol actually costs less per million cache reads - $0.40/million.
If you are doing a lot of agentic work where the vast bulk of your token consumption will be cached input reads, you won't get the expected cost savings from Grok.
I imagine this is the result of some problem in their serving infrastructure that I hope they will fix, because then the pricing will become actually strong. (The other possibility is that they bet on distracting people with good headline prices assuming they'd miss the bad cache pricing, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.)
Personally, I’ve switched to cursor ultra, which picks between about five models to do whatever you want.
It's weird not to pick the best model all the time, if you can. But I got so frustrated with GPT-5.6 spending forever and then doing the wrong thing and making bugs.
I'd rather have auto do the wrong thing fast and make bugs and then it can fix them. It's a trade-off, but I found the speed better. And you can always switch to a better model if you don't trust It.
Not yet. Don't give the guy ideas.
Anyone using Sam Altman's OpenAI is making a poor ethical decision, but anyone using Grok is, objectively, supporting a monster.
Take Flock for example. Reading license plate is legal. But when at done at scale, it's a massive loophole into violation of 4th amendment.
Based on how much energy average Americans use, maybe they are responsible for causing adverse effects elsewhere in the world. USAID could exist as a means to undo some of that. It does not anymore.
Now you can argue that US does not have any kind of obligation to send 500M to Bangladesh. But it sent it anyway, for years, and then DJT came and broke promises.
The inflated price you pay at gas station, groceries, and in interest when you're borrowing money, is a result of those broken promises.
I really don’t understand what link you think there is between USAID spending being cut and inflation. Gas prices are obviously Iran. Everything else started years ago.
Citation needed.
Here's a quick review I just posted if anyone's interested:
Competition is good. Excluding a leading player in the market because you don’t like Elon Musk is…something.
I assume they're referring to the recent discovery that Grok Build was uploading entire repositories to their servers in the background, include .env secrets that had been excluded
https://gist.github.com/cereblab/dc9a40bc26120f4540e4e09b75f...
That incident has put Grok on the no-fly list for a lot of people and companies
Frankly, the people who keep bringing this up are mostly engaged in motivated reasoning. I don't trust any company, and any product where I have to send my code to a third party to make it work is a devil's bargain. I don't trust any of the major labs, but it is what it is.
The only way forward is local models, but we're not there yet.
His grandfather wrote his tracts to raise an alarm about what he called “mind control,” on the radio and television, where “an unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the White man.”
Man, politics are a hell of a drug. Guilt-by-association tu quoque logic is just fine when it's someone you don't like.
Literally every commodity product is in a crowded space, and easily substituted. If it's a good product (Grok Build objectively is one of the very best in the space), it's a good product, and it's self-defeating to avoid it because you hate a guy for political reasons.
Just as it would be nonsensical to avoid shopping at WalMart, Target, or any of a million other places. Because I guarantee they're all associated with people you won't like.
I also think it's callous to brush away "political reasons" as though it's some trivial abstract thing. Or perhaps it comes from a place of nihilism?
I choose not to give my money to people I think are enormously evil. That's really all there is to it. I don't see why this is "nonsensical".
Oh stop. Other people believe different things than you. If you cannot see how using a coding agent is not "devoid of personal or social responsibility", then you really need to step away from the keyboard.
What I find devoid of responsibility is the argument you made originally--that making choices as a consumer informed by anything external to the direct value you're paying for is pointless/inexplicable/self-sabotaging/whatever.
Based on your reply, I'm not actually sure if you actually believe this, or if it's only a form of motivated reasoning because you have some positive feelings about Elon or whatever, and that we wouldn't be having this argument if the original commenter was boycotting some other product for some reason you agreed with.
That isn't what I wrote. There are tons of valid reasons to avoid a product, other than the "direct value you're paying for". I don't pay for lots of products because I don't like the past corporate behavior, for example. I'm disinclined to use a particular AI lab's products because they seem to be on a mission to scare the crap out of everyone, and usher in an AI regulatory state. I don't support that, so I don't use the product.
What I said was that it's spitting in the wind to do what you're doing, because it's based on personal dislike of a single man. You don't like Musk, for political reasons, and because of that you've ruled out a product line.
To date, SpaceX has done nothing that bothers me, other than have a bug that they fixed immediately. So I use the product. Musk's political associations are irrelevant to me.
Anyway, you do you. Hopefully you now understand my "bizarre take".
In a capitalist society voting with your wallet is one of the few powers consumers have to change corporate behavior.
Why would I give that up?
I’m absolutely “hot money” when it comes to coding models. These things are commodities.
Half the coding I do is for my phone now because Cursor Ultra agents have their own VMs that are spun up specifically for each project.
Grok bot has a bunch of agents that'll share a VM and they can do pretty much anything you can do digitally. Right on I have them checking slick deals every morning for a pellet smoker.
I had it book a date night for me. I had it fix one of my projects by rebuilding my website and republishing it and then checking one of the container runs to see if it has errors on it.
I had a call different banks to figure out which phone navigation tree to get through and put someone on the phone for me, and then call me
The list just goes on and on.
Only one of those capabilities can actually deliver kinetic solutions. Meanwhile big tech revenue is delivering ad solutions.
Do you have ANY idea about the SpaceX corporate structure? Elon is basically SpaceX's Sun God and the other shareholders don't matter.
Plus SpaceX is incorporated in Texas where I'm fairly sure the legal system is arranged in such a way that it's supremely hard to contest anything in terms of corporate decisions.
As far as the average person cares, every SpaceX shareholder and employee is basically an Elon sharecropper and they matter less than Musk's toenails in terms of corporate decision making.
As someone who's used Gemini 3.7 Flash (Google sub mostly for the storage) and DS4 Flash a lot (~6B tokens), I'd actually place DS4 Flash (even pre-0713) above Gemini 3.7 Flash. Gemini has a tendency to leave some things unimplemented; perhaps it's agy which frankly leaves a bit to be desired as a harness.
Although I will praise DS4 Flash any day, it no longer makes sense for me after the price increase (GPT 5.6 Luna is a much better price point) and I have completely migrated my high volume workflows to Muse Spark 1.2 Contributor (which I find to perform better than DS4 Flash 0713, happily).
Is this Gemini 3.7 Flash by any chance? Then - No. Not sleeping on it. It’s just not good.
I had a Python package build fail this week due to an unpinned dependency. Gave it to Gemini spent 5-7mins before I noticed it going off in some tangent. Reran with Claude Opus 4.8 - fixed in under a minute.
I know anecdata of one. But something like this has happened every time I test a new model from Google.
Im not convinced to pay $200 for Claude’s models.
With Claude, I have to intervene every 15-20 minutes, it’s non-autonomous and it’s incredibly unreliable at self-correction. GPT is strong at self-correction but it tends to drift away from the plan to self-correct in a loop very often - a lot of tokens and time burnt on aimless churn. Opus tends to push its uninformed opinions and fake retrieval, drifting every turn increasingly farther from the intended and approved design. Opus skims over specs and makes too many mistakes.
As for closed frontier models, I prefer the GPT models over Claude’s.
I’ve started relying more on Grok, GLM, Kimi and DeepSeek models for subagents - I’ve ended up with a factory and am seeking to reduce my reliance on the closed frontier models - they’re just not SoTA on their own for development anymore.
Also doing /clear with a md file handover if I think the next input is diverse enough from the previous work.
You get a lot more out of it.
Not sure if this is best practice though.
Providers will generally keep your session in cache for at least 5 minutes, possibly hours. The exact cache policy depends on the provider.
If your session expires from cache then the next time you send a message you will have to pay for all the tokens you had used in context up until that point again. e.g. if you have 200k tokens in context then if your session goes cold and you send a message after expiry you will have to pay for those 200k tokens again.
With 1M contexts especially you have to be extremely careful that you don't end up resubmitting requests for hundreds of thousands of tokens again and again.
Try to get yourself and the model to use disk for medium-term context rather than model context, that way it's much easier to /clear and restart if you need to go to the bathroom or something.
I run a lot of SlopCodeBench - https://github.com/michaelasper/benchmarks
Fable/Sol/GLM 5.3/Kimi are its league (in that order) Deepseek/Opus is solid Qwen 27B is the floor - there's no reason to use Sonnet/Terra/Haiku
For everyday activity - I don't think you need to be using Sol (xhigh) for everything - unless you're made of money - I've found using Luna from OpenAI to be more than enough - it'll outreach to Opus/Sol when it needs to
Haven't had access to Gemini 3.7 but we're getting it at work soon, will give it a go!
Codex CLI is pretty bare bones in a bad way (at least Pi is extensible). Claude code is vibeslopped to the extreme
To be precise, you need a while-loop, user input and bash.
It's about 50 lines of Python: https://minimal-agent.com/
I built my own agent based on this and use it every day.
It was "amazing" back when I first tried 4.6, but that's just my rose-coloured glasses speaking, I guess. I think I was one of the first few to call out Opus 5 for being hot garbage.
But seriously:
Fable still makes the best/smartest plans. That new Ox Alpha (also in Freepi right now!) can do a very good job but it doesn't necessarily recheck it's own reasoning (and can get stuck in an incorrect assumption and try to fit the world around it's reasoning) Sol xhigh is also very smart but god it's slow, and it frequently massively overbuilds. It's like it's main goal is to spend tokens so it makes your react app Soc 2 compliant before it proves it even works.
I've largely stopped using the Gemini models. :-/ just hard to justify.
Basically the only thing I care about these days is SPEED.
Everyone has their own frameworks for risk assessments, its more of the historical incidents associated with it than politics
But let's be real: Musk exists as a polarizing political character, and his association with Grok just breaks some people's brains. A fair number of those people don't want to admit it, and just latch on to any rationalization other than politics.
Anthropic could make the same mistake tomorrow, and I guarantee that we wouldn't be hearing about it in a week, let alone months from now.
On a personal level, everyone have their own rules, they may not be able to imposing them on others , however they do happen to evaluate their relative understanding of other people based upon those rules.
For me personally, I would probably put Anthropic, OpenAI and Grok in the same bucket, they are doing everything possible to make money. Ethics, morals, long term impacts, all of such things are not in their playbook. But again what these companies are doing just reflects the people who invested in them and what they want out of it. In some ways you can say its the money trying to maximize itself at all costs.
People have values.
Many people strongly disapprove of Musk’s actions. Many don’t - fine! Personal choice. But for people who do, refusing to support him commercially is hardly brain-eaten territory. There’s plenty of competition, and competition isn’t the only value at play.
Setting aside the actual legitimacy of whatever complaints you have about Musk, you aren’t “supporting” him by using Grok, any more than you’re “supporting Xi Jinping” by using DeepSeek, or “supporting Jeff Bezos” by using Amazon, or “supporting the CEO of Exxon” by using energy. Or “supporting” any of a million other people you probably don’t like simply by existing in the world as a consumer. What you’re actually doing is called spitting in the wind.
Major conglomerate providers of commodities are not controlled, or even operated to the benefit of, any single person. Musk is the operating officer of a corporation of many thousands of individuals. He has shares in that company, but so do millions of other people. It would be far more rational if you could point to some specific “evil” thing SpaceX is doing as a company that you oppose, but you can’t even do that. It’s all gotta be about one guy who you don’t like.
There are other reasons to not use Elon Musk's AI beyond politics, though this month he's investing $200 million to sway the Texas midterms back to an awful politician, far closer to home than what Xi Jinping might be doing.
It wasn't long ago that Elon tried to bias Grok to not say bad things about him to the point that Grok would say that Elon was the best piss-drinker in the world and that Elon was in the top three of every category (basketball, mathematics, physics, etc). https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro...
If I have to tie-break between competing AI services, I'm hella not choosing that one.
Yes, that's what "commodity" means, and why I used the word.
> There are other reasons to not use Elon Musk's AI beyond politics, though this month he's investing $200 million to sway the Texas midterms back to an awful politician, far closer to home than what Xi Jinping might be doing.
It's amusing that you can't even help yourself from mentioning politics when you're trying to deny that it disproportionately impacts your thinking. Literally, "there are other reasons to not use it...but I'll spend the rest of my comment listing a bunch of reasons I don't like Elon."
I've heard all of it before. I'm telling you that it doesn't sway me, any more than telling me I should stop buying things at WalMart, use energy, or any of a million other things I do on a daily basis that probably, very likely, in some direct or indirect way, benefit someone I don't like.
You do you, but if I eliminated every product or service that was associated with a "bad person", I'd be living in a cave in the wilderness, crapping in a hole and eating berries.
I'm just eliminating one less than you are.
I "glossed over" all of your political comments.
No, it doesn't. Aside from the face-slappingly obvious fact that SpaceX is losing a half a billion dollars a quarter, that's not how corporate revenue works. Unless the corporate profits are paid out in dividends, you don't just get to hoover them up as a shareholder.
No one said anything about dollar-in revenue dollar-out dividend. only you.
if i have vested interest in a company and that company’s value is perceived to increase then i get to leverage that value into economic power. yes
Leave Musk to one side for a second. Is there no one, even hypothetically, whose actions would make you turn away from their company’s products and services? Even if it has no effect on the overall viability of their business? A local restaurant where you know the owner is a bully to his staff? A tradesman who was unbelievably rude to your friend? A newspaper whose owner personally made sure they trashed the reputation of your business? A wedding photographer who proudly refuses to work for couples who had children out of wedlock?
Surely your devotion to the principle of competition doesn’t override all your other beliefs?
A lot of people aren't touching anything Grok related since they were caught uploading entire repositories to their servers in the background
https://gist.github.com/cereblab/dc9a40bc26120f4540e4e09b75f...
Codex has been really doling out the resets lately, which is fine, but I don’t consider that “real” usage limits.
I hit my weekly limit on $200/mo Codex plan in about ~2 days. :/ I'm not doing anything custom/crazy/special. A lot of 5.6 Sol Ultra though, I'll give you that.
If you're not doing anything special there is no reason to use the Ultra mode.
Ultra mode is for applying the maximum amount of tokens to a problem without regard to conserving any quota.
I've found it consistently amazing at game dev. It sounds like something that would be difficult for an LLM to verify and iterate on properly, but it almost feels like having a mini-Carmack inside your computer once you try it out. You can throw it at broad, sweeping optimization passes, writing 5 different styles of eyesight sensor frameworks to see what works best in the game as it is, visual scripting integration problems/extensions, etc. with fantastic results.
Also found Ultra great for "get this local LLM working as fast as possible on this odd server setup with old GPUs and AMX support, writing custom kernels/modifications to llama.cpp/sglang/etc as you go while taking notes from relevant research papers and online posts"
I have the appropriate privacy settings set up but wondering how much I can trust each company with them.
But one thing I’ve noticed which I find a bit of a red flag: by default you only archive chats. If you go online, it says there’s a location in settings where can delete your archive. But it’s not that obvious where to find, and when I finally find some link, it was literally broken. It said it can’t find any archived chats, even though I archive them all the time.
Bit of a red flag for me. Both Anthropic and OpenAI claim that when you delete a chat, it’s gone after some retention period. They’re just words but if they’re secretly training on your traces and you delete your chats, then they would need to break two terms/conditions: ignoring your “train on my data” preference and ignoring your orders to delete chats. So it is an extra barrier.
But OpenAI, as far as I can tell, doesn’t let you delete your chats. Convenient then if they change their mind about training sometime in the future.
But these are not the same level of technical assurance you get from say, a zero data retention provider on OpenRouter.
Right now I am finding I have to tolerate substantial friction to use Hermes for personal stuff with a ZDR provider and ChatGPT and Codex for less personal stuff because the products and models are simply so much better.
Does this mean it can break your code faster now, or have they actually worked on making it good? Every single time I've given Gemini a chance (in older point versions) it would almost immediately break something and throw itself into a loop. I have not experienced it being useful for programming and almost never heard an account of somebody else doing so.
Remember those stories of LLMs catastrophically deleting entire repositories or databases? It was always Gemini.
I'm amazed that you'd trust Gemini over DeepSeek, which I've had very good experiences with after some tuning, though still on a relatively short leash.
Something with this combo works really well for Rust dev. The model doesn't really annoy me at all and I have not switched to Opus or SOL. And the monthly token bill is much lower...
jcode is a very very peculiar harness, but has some out-of-the-box thinking built in (by the devs, thinking ...)
Crush is also very well put together, and, IIRC, can do "mid turn" interruption, so can be driven from the outside.-
> kimi k3 - one of the few models thats willing to commit crimes for you
codex is good, both cli and desktop app, you get lots of usage on any plan. sol is good! and gets the job done, write or dictate a very long and thoughtful prompt, and leave sol xhigh or max fast working on it for an hour or so
omp is an amazing harness, any feature claude code or codex is adding has likely already been here for a couple months. good harness which im suggesting to all my developer friends, but for everyone else codex is the better option due to its simplicity and being the plug and play option
claude is decent, but not great. all models are somehow getting restrictive. you get basically unlimited opus on max plans, fable is good but slow and the random guardrails suck soo much which is why i havent used it once in weeks now.
gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it, including even me
kimi k3 - great for frontend, one of the few models thats willing to commit crimes for you AND has the intelligence to have a chance at actually succeeding;
ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there
glm 5.3 i haven't tested yet
honorable mention to local models which are actually getting good now! 5090s will continue to get more and more expensive in the coming months. sadly.
theres way way more than claude in this world and its taking people surprisingly long to figure that out. maybe its for the best!