Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

mariocesar

I have an 'ask' alias in my shell that just uses Haiku. I use it daily for pretty much everything For more long work, I now use Fable to create a PLAN.md. I tell it to make a plan that will be executed by other models, and most of the time it ends up choosing Opus or Sonnet. I didn't start doing this recently. Before that, I would just use the top model for everything. Splitting the work across different models depending on the task has helped a lot. They run faster, and I usually get much better results

bellowsgulch

mimo-v2.5-free, mimo-v2.5, deepseek-flash in that order, honestly don’t even bother using qwen3.6-35b-a3b now unless i need uncensored tasks finished, mostly reverse engineering most engineering tasks don’t require frontier llms when they get stuck, then i consider moving up to more capable models purchasing a claude plan seems widely unnecessary to me the tasks they do better than the average engineer cut both ways: unless you have an existing portfolio of well written and designed work done pre-llms, it looks like you’re producing slop that pretends to be well designed poor typography choices despite using the mode, poor layout choices despite using popular CSS frameworks etc bad engineers will always be bad engineers tools don’t make up for it edit: a follow up to this— everyone is using eyebrows in their layouts and have no fucking clue why it was done to begin with everyone has a status pill floating above their front page hero display text and its not fucking status related so gross

jraedisch

opusplan, for the same reasons.

alstonite

Astra low for pretty much everything gets me through the work week with a bit to spare on the 5x max plan.

vallerie

I've found good success with the new Gemini models on Antigravity. Granted I use my models either: - like a fancy auto complete (here are some stub methods, they should do X, fill them in) - using fairly detailed plans and test harnesses, so blowing up the world is hard The 3.X Flash family have been fairly capable models, and the selling point for me is just raw speed. Gemini is noticeably faster than the competition, about 3-4x, and I just get work done faster with it. That said I'm keeping an eye on Open Weights. DS4 Flash was good until price hikes, and finding a provider that serves at high speed and without quantisation at the prior price is tricky.

traverseda

Claude, not necessarily because it's better. I find deepseek flash to be of similar quality. But because it's so heavily subsidized.

hmokiguess

I think for me stuff peaked around Opus 4.7, I was leaning heavily on the model with paired supervision from reviewing the output manually every step of the way. Ever since that things got a little more complicated and in an unsustainable pace for me, I am trying to remove myself from the equation and build verifiable and reliable tests with quick feedback loops that let frontier models run autonomously but in all honesty not seeing it scale well, I need to take a step back and reassess if the trade off was worthwhile. Frontier models are being incredible at making me feel like they passed my tests only to eventually reveal some tech debt that forces me to take large pivots. It seems the speed is sexy but the results are questionable, models may have hit a limit in my workflow and I think harness engineering is more important than anything. Would love to hear feedback on this take and if others have experienced similar things and what they did to overcome this. (Context would be solo founder bootstrapping greenfield work with full autonomy and sometimes more room for rapid iteration)

herpdyderp

- Default: Codex with Terra Max (because it's crazy cheap) - Preferred: Claude Code with Opus 5 Medium

expedited123

Qwen 3.8 flash-next or Gemma 26B because I care about responsible and sustainable usage of LLM's.

philbo

Glm-5.3-flash for me. I like faster models because I stay involved all the way through. I don't delegate full control to the agent because it's harder to understand the end result that way.

o_m

I used to main Claude, but I can't stand how it writes. I feel like I'm wasting too much time trying to decipher the output. Adding writing rules does not seem to work. Now I use GPT 5.6 Terra high fast mode, with Luna for everything else. I might consider using Sol for planning. I can't stand using Sol or smarter models for coding, because they will eventually try to rewrite everything in the codebase. I also don't want to use the Claude Code and Codex agent harnesses. The good thing with Codex subscription is that it can be used in other harnesses, unlike Claude. As far as I know, only Anthropic has this restriction.

ewindisch

I'm using a lot of gpt-5.6-Luna and glm-5.3-flash. Astra is really fantastic but it's too expensive. I average about 50-90B/tok/mo.

sourcecodeplz

Muse Spark 1.3 Contribs unbeatable price/intel ratio per M tokens: $0.10 (input) $0.20 (output) $0.002 (cached-input)

jinnko

I was using various open weights models until glm-5.3-flash came out recently. It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest. I've assigned it to all my agents across my harness and it's getting the job done. Still needs a good steer every now and then, but a great work horse.

w22oop

I use gemma 4 12B and Qwen 3.8 9B

the__alchemist

Sol High-Xhigh, and Opus 5. Granted, yesterday I threw a few tasks to Astra which the former 2 botches; it produced clean, correct solutions quickly, so pending further eval, this may take over. IMO unless it's a mechanical tasks, it's worth it to use carefully -crafted queries on the more expensive models, than iterate through messier solutions on the cheaper ones. edit: maybe not. Astra has imitated Fable, and appears unusable for biology due to safeguards.

codazoda

I use Sonnit for my personal work and Opus for my professional work. For my personal stuff, I'm on a small $20 plan, so I need to use tokens conservatively. I was very rarely exceeding limits until I built a Dark Software Factory. It's not as efficient at token use. So, I use Sonnit over Opus here. At work I have a $100 plan that I rarely exceed so I use Opus. I have access to Fable too, and I did use it a lot while it was new, but I don't find it improves most of my work by too much. I do mostly bug fixing across several hundred repositories with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, mostly written by humans over the past 20-years. These projects interact with each other so I run claude from the root of my sandbox (I was nervous to try this but I'm not looking back now). I also use Sol as a secondary for my personal work. I pay for it because I like to talk to ChatGPT on the web. Since I already have the subscription, I let Sol write plans for me. It does a better job at certain tasks and it saves me some Claude tokens. Maybe I should consider Terra for the task, but I don't run up against my usage limits for the little bit I use it. I'm trying to use Gemma 4 12b for some workloads but I haven't mastered the model yet. It's still very experimental for me. I can get work from it but it takes a lot of hand-holding. For local models, however, it's all I have the RAM for.

Havoc

GLM5.3 - I'm on one of the ancient plans, meaning basically unlimited. ...and then sprinkle in some other models when i think a second opinion will help

oduis

I like AI more on the short leash, giving it specific agents tasks, one at a time (centaur mode). I found GPT 5.6 LUNA to be astonishingly capable. Plus, it so fast, that it does not block my flow of throughts, like the more capable but slower models often do. And it is so cheap that I do not use Ollama local models anymore. Luna is far more capable, and so cheap that the energy prices here in Germany eat the gains of local hosting ;-)

amelius

Reading through this thread, I notice not many people are using models from the Chinese AI labs ...