Isn’t this obvious? When you have a task you think is hard. You give it to a cleverer model. When a task is straight forward you give it to an older one.

Not sure why you were downvoted.. I think you are correct.

As evidenced by furious posters on r/cursor, who make every prompt to super-opus-thinking-max+++ and are astonished when they have blown their monthly request allowance in about a day.

If I need another pair of (artificial) eyes on a difficult debugging problem, I’ll occasionally use a premium model sparingly. For chore tasks or UI layout tweaks, I’ll use something more economical (like grok-4-fast or claude-4.5-haiku - not old models but much cheaper).

Why are you hell bent on using a LLM model to solve your problem?

If I have a straight forward task, I give it to an LLM.

If I have a task I think is hard, I plan how I will tackle it, and then handle it myself in a series of steps.

LLM usage has become an end in itself in your development process.

Not realy. Most developers would prefer one model that does everything best. That is the easiest, set it and forget it, no manual descision required.

What is unclear from the presentation is wether they do this or not. Do teams that use Sonnet 4.5 just always use it, and teams on Sonnet 4.0 likewise? Or do individuals decided which model to use on a per task basis.

Personally I tend to default to just 1, and only go to an alternative if it gets stuck or doesn't get me what I want.