> Pre-agent, there wasn't always an obvious difference between models. Various models had their charms. Nowadays, I don't want to entertain anything less than the frontier models.

This is a very naive and misguided opinion. In most tasks, including complex coding tasks, you can hardly tell the difference between a frontier model and something like GPT4.1. You need to really focus on areas such as context window, tool calling and specific aspects of reasoning steps to start noticing differences. To make matters worse, frontier models are taking a brute force approach to results which ends up making them far more expensive to run, both in terms of what shows up on your invoice and how much more you have to wait to get any resemblance of output.

And I won't even go into the topic or local models.

> You need to really focus on areas such as context window, tool calling and specific aspects of reasoning steps to start noticing differences.

This is like saying "the current models and the old models are the same if you ignore every important advance they've made"