I’ve been slowly converting my org to use opus 5.5 as default over sonnet and the difference is night and day. More usage, because it does shit better the first time. Less cost, because it does shit better the first time. It’s literally been the thing that’s kicked our org in the pants to actually adopt agentic methodology at scale.

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remind opus to not over-enjoy problems

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The sentence I shared above helps considerably to use.

In my private coding benchmark Luna Low effort is beaten by Qwen 3.8 Flash Next Coder IQ_1 served by Strata locally https://github.com/niko1221/strata

Luna medium effort is very slightly better than its output and completes tasks in 5-10x less time.

Luna is as great and extremely efficient at exactly what OpenAI advertises it to be good at: focused tasks, small edits, automations.

If it's used for that then using anything more powerful is just inefficient usage of your tokens.

I have found in my own benchmarks that a simple prompt which has a single constraint is reliably ignored by Luna, even on Max, even with another Luna agent reviewing with instructions to check the output against the constraint, at which point they OK it anyways. There is not a single task of any scale I can trust it not to fuck up.

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> Luna is unusable garbage

What are some uses for which you found Luna to be unusable garbage?

From my side, I use Harbor to score tasks and Luna certainly performs when the prompt is either well or overspecified.

For me I’d trust Luna to do anything I would a high school student but once we get to college I lose faith.

maybe you just aren't very good at prompting and need the highest level of intelligence possible to kind of make it work?

for myself anything over medium overthinks and is worse.

Oh, fuck off. For one, I work in an LLM startup and work on the harness for our own models, and we're 8-digit profitable, so I'd say I know a thing or two about prompting. For two, there is no prompt that makes Luna work. It ignores your fucking prompt. The OP related how Cursor has a quotation mark tic and blatantly ignored a single constraint not to use quotation marks. Luna also has the same deficiency. You can give it a single paragraph prompt with a single sentence constraint not to do X and it will do X every time if it's in the average path for the prompt.

well, i and many other people have been able to make luna work. heck, people make a 27b model work locally. so if you can't manage that, and you're working on something like a harness, what else could it be?

Why are you apologizing?

Your comment could be misread as rude by an insecure ("8 digit") person who read that as a challenge to their intelligence and skills, however the reply they gave to your comment is the very defition of rude.

Yes, but then you’re saying Sol Max isn’t good enough. Sol is very capable.

Also, unless I’m overlooking something, you’re spending time within non-codex models, so you’re not going to get the results you’re looking for.

We have dramatically different experiences. I use specification driven design. I have Sol or Opus designed a specification, the plan, and the task breakdown. I then use Luna as the implementation agent. It is told to do test driven development. I have tasks to run tests on just the modified code. Luna knocks it out of the park pretty much every time.

My biggest complaint is that it melds IO concerns such as timeout, with business requirements. Normally, I just to put that in the IO layer. After that, it’s basically done.

Given my pattern, a new feature normally involves Luna creating 20 to 50 files. After it thinks it’s done with its work, a Sol agent will review the code. This loop goes twice. If there’s still issues, I have to deal with them. I’ve not had to deal with them.

This when I’m at work. At home I do pretty much this but with GLM 5.3 Flash. Even less money.

I use Sol 6.1 Max when it's simple to verify the result and for relatively easy stuff and otherwise Opus 5.5.

I have managed to burn 500 GitHub credits on a task with Sol 6.1 Max, not mostly it's below 10 for short stuff. Opus typically being more expensive by a factor of 5-10.

So, full agreement.