> Learning to do more with less money isn’t as bad as many people think.

We are wading into philosophy here, but I believe this analogy doesn't track in this case -- my suspicion from this blog post and others is that already today, the Pro level thinking models are a positive multiplier to your research output similar to how the models one level lower are a multiplier to one's programming output.

Maybe one can someday use the cheaper models similar to how you can use cheaper models than Opus/5.5 and still be nearly as productive as a programmer -- but I am trying and failing doing exactly that for research questions.