Yeah, the speed and price are why I use it. I find that any LLM is garbage at writing code unless it gets constant high-entropy feedback (e.g. an MCP tool reporting lint errors, a test, etc.) and the quality of the final code depends a lot more on how well the LLM was guided than the quality of the model.

A bad model with good automated tooling and prompts will beat a good model without them, and if your goal is to build good tooling and prompts you need a tighter iteration loop.

This is so far off my experience. Grok 4 fast is straight trash, it literally isn’t even close to decent code for what I tried. Meanwhile Sonnet is miles better - but even still, Opus while I guess technically being only slightly better, in practice is so much better that I find it hard to use Sonnet at all.