while everyone is somehow still stuck on and fascinated by claude, heres your quick update on the sota of coding models and harnesses mid august 2026

codex is good, both cli and desktop app, you get lots of usage on any plan. sol is good! and gets the job done, write or dictate a very long and thoughtful prompt, and leave sol xhigh or max fast working on it for an hour or so

omp is an amazing harness, any feature claude code or codex is adding has likely already been here for a couple months. good harness which im suggesting to all my developer friends, but for everyone else codex is the better option due to its simplicity and being the plug and play option

claude is decent, but not great. all models are somehow getting restrictive. you get basically unlimited opus on max plans, fable is good but slow and the random guardrails suck soo much which is why i havent used it once in weeks now.

gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it, including even me

kimi k3 - great for frontend, one of the few models thats willing to commit crimes for you AND has the intelligence to have a chance at actually succeeding;

ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there

glm 5.3 i haven't tested yet

honorable mention to local models which are actually getting good now! 5090s will continue to get more and more expensive in the coming months. sadly.

theres way way more than claude in this world and its taking people surprisingly long to figure that out. maybe its for the best!

My token usage on Claude models has dropped by 83% over the last month - I'm pretty much only using it for quick one off questions or reading papers. it feels impossible for me to get Opus models to stop entering into cyclic loops, and my work is too security adjacent for Fable.

Codex has been an excellent workhorse - doesn't feel like I have to dance around the guardrails, doesn't lose _everything_ when it compacts, and doesn't litter the workspace with a million and one planning to plan files.

I think harness/model pairs matter more than your analysis lets on.

I've had great luck with the ds flash v4, paired with prime-agent for the harness--I like the results a lot. And you get to see thinking tokens.

I haven't liked the model as much in opencode.

Sol & luna have been great everywhere. sol plans, luna builds.

Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Fast and accurate.

And it can communicate, unlike the gobbledygook that comes out of Claude.

> ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there

As someone who's used Gemini 3.7 Flash (Google sub mostly for the storage) and DS4 Flash a lot (~6B tokens), I'd actually place DS4 Flash (even pre-0713) above Gemini 3.7 Flash. Gemini has a tendency to leave some things unimplemented; perhaps it's agy which frankly leaves a bit to be desired as a harness.

Although I will praise DS4 Flash any day, it no longer makes sense for me after the price increase (GPT 5.6 Luna is a much better price point) and I have completely migrated my high volume workflows to Muse Spark 1.2 Contributor (which I find to perform better than DS4 Flash 0713, happily).

> gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it

Is this Gemini 3.7 Flash by any chance? Then - No. Not sleeping on it. It’s just not good.

I had a Python package build fail this week due to an unpinned dependency. Gave it to Gemini spent 5-7mins before I noticed it going off in some tangent. Reran with Claude Opus 4.8 - fixed in under a minute.

I know anecdata of one. But something like this has happened every time I test a new model from Google.

the future is here and one should be thankful for its slightly uneven distribution. otherwise we would hardly have anything left about which to develop strong opinions!

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