I get what you mean. But for many people, AI coding is not about solving complex problems. No, they do it mostly themselves. AI coding for many is a productivity tool, where it helps you with mundane, but laborious tasks.

In my setup, I use a daily workhorse for such things. They should be fast, cheap and reasonably working well. I don’t expect it to be smart, but need it to follow instructions perfectly and handle tool calling well.

For architectural work or debugging help, I use the top models instead.

That works reasonably well for me with a low cost.