For coding I don’t use any of the previous gen models anymore.

Ideally I would have both fast and SOTA; if I would have to pick one I’d go with SOTA.

There a report by OpenRouter on what folks tend to pay for it; it generally is SOTA in the coding domain. Folks are still paying a premium for them today.

There is a question if there is a bar where coding models are “good enough”; for myself I always want smarter / SOTA.

FWIW coding is one of the largest usages for LLM's where SOTA quality matters.

I think the bar for when coding models are "good enough" will be a tradeoff between performance and price. I could be using Cerebras Code and saving $50 a month, but Opus 4.5 is fast enough and I value the piece-of-mind I have knowing it's quality is higher than Cerebras' open source models to spend the extra money. It might take a while for this gap to close, and what is considered "good enough" will be different for every developer, but certainly this gap cannot exist forever.