I think counter to the assumption of myself (and many), for long form agent coding tasks, models are not as easily hot swappable as I thought.

I have developed decent intuition on what kinds of problems Codex, Claude, Cursor(& sub-variants), Composer etc. will or will not be able to do well across different axes of speed, correctness, architectural taste, ...

If I had to reflect on why I still don't use Gemini, it's because they were late to the party and I would now have to be intentional about spending time learning yet another set of intuitions about those models.

I feel like "prompting language" doesn't translate over perfectly either. It's like we become experts at operating a particular AI agent.

I've been experimenting with small local models and the types of prompts you use with these are very different than the ones you use with Claude Code. It seems less different between Claude, Codex, and Gemini but there are differences.

It's hard to articulate those differences but I think that I kind of get in a groove after using models for a while.