I've been using llama 4 Maverick through openrouter. Gemini was my go to but I switched basically the day it came out to try it out.

I haven't switched back. At least for my use cases it's been meeting my expectations.

I haven't tried Microsoft's new 1.58 bit model but it may be a great swap out for sentencellm, the legendary all-MiniLM-L6-v2.

I found that if I'm unfamiliar with the knowledge domain I'm mostly using AI but then as I dive in the ratio of AI to human changes to the point where it's AI at 0 and it's all human.

Basically AI wins at day 1 but isn't any better at day 50. If this can change then it's the next step

Yeah, I'd recommend trying Gemini 2.5 Pro. I know early Gemini weren't great, but the recent one is really impressive in terms of coding ability. This project is kind of designed around the recent breakthrough.