A couple of points.

First, it does not really reflect my experience. I find modern models to be largely interchangeable when it comes to common software engineering tasks, including some of the more recent open weight ones. The strongest models become interesting for Ph.D. level of work for me, which is not something I deal with regularly anymore.

None of them are perfect; they all have their strengths and shortcomings, but I can reasonably work with all of them and it honestly doesn't matter much anymore. I do sometimes wonder what exactly people are doing to see such a difference; at a minimum, their workflows must be very different from mine.

Second, you're arguing based on subscription pricing. But Anthropic makes the bulk of its revenue (and has its biggest margins) from enterprise/API pricing, where they are the most expensive provider by far. Anthropic isn't going to make a lot of money off your $20 subscription. With a subscription, you currently get more usage per dollar out of Anthropic's than OpenAI's plans, which approximately offsets the difference in API pricing.

▲

redox99 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> I find modern models to be largely interchangeable when it comes to common software engineering tasks

If you think that, it means you're not demanding enough from your models.

Opus 5.5 still makes a lot of mistakes. Even if it can technically do all tasks you throw at it, there's no way it can do it at 100% reliability.

To be clear, AI writes 100% of my code since last year. But it still produces bugs, needs multiple prompts, and has less intuition than a human.

	▲	rbehrends 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If I'm not "demanding enough" from models, it's precisely because they are imperfect. Having them do long, complex tasks autonomously usually comes with more cleanup work afterwards IME. My usual workflow (not counting throwaway code) is to use agents as virtual pair programmers, which gives me a good balance of quality and velocity. Each interaction with the agent remains individually comprehensible and makes progress towards one of the following goals: - Understanding the problem/solution space. - Implementing a solution. - Understanding the solution, especially any agent-written parts and interaction with existing code. - Evaluating the solution (tests, code analysis, what-if scenarios, consider edge cases). This does not just involve the model generating code, but also explaining or analyzing it as needed. This process allows me to retain a mental model in lockstep with developing the written code and have some assurance both of its functionality and non-functional requirements. It also fits in nicely with most existing team-level workflows. But it's also something that I can do with pretty much any of the modern models.
	▲	NoDodgeQuestion 27 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do you have example, open source you make using non-interchangeable model, that you can not make using other model?

▲

cloverich an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To clarify, i use both subscription pricing (personal use) and api pricing (at work). My spend going down was referring to api pricing, while using it more (for "everything").

Personal efficiency is noted as never hitting my limit despite it doing huge amounts of work at a time (ex: rewrite my notes app in swift for ios and install on my phone, 2 hours later its opened on my phone, looks nice, is working (base set of features). No follow up prompts, around 2 hours of work. 45% of my 5-hour limit.

Work efficiency is spend, task complexity, code quality (how often i have to steer - rare now), and wiring it up to more stuff (ex having it setup metrics and dashboards etc etc).

▲

bigwheels 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I used to sing the same tune as you are now- "models are interchangeable". For today, all other models seems significantly dumber and waste more of my time than Opus 5.5.

tl;dr: You should try Opus 5.5 and report back.

	▲	rbehrends 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I have been using Opus 5.5 (as well as pretty much all frontier models). I am not sure why you think I haven't.