I do the same, and have excellent results. Gemini 3.1 Pro high diagnosed and solved 3 complex issues today that Opus Max was stumbling on for a few hours in one shot. This was even when I started new chats and tried debugging with Ultracode instead with Claude.

As much as people on HN like to dunk on Gemini, I’ve always found it to be pretty good at understanding a code base more than Claude.

for the last few weeks I have been using composer 2.5 (cursors fine tune of kimi 2.5) and honestly i don't see it worth the price to use 5.5, opus or sonnet any more. for almost all the tasks i have given it, it has handled it perfectly well and is a lot cheaper.

if I get a harder challenge for it i'll jump up a model for planning until that its been solid.

I now chat with opus about architecture, let it make an implementation plan, and then it calls codewhale with deepseek in parallel on all tasks, reviewing their output. Works pretty well.

SWE-Bench measures single tasks in isolation. In a real loop the model usually loses track of what I was trying to do long before code quality becomes the issue.

You should throw GPT into the mix to UX/UI and call it the three stooges.

I find not much difference between Sonnet 4.6 and opus models too for most task that I need - maybe my needs are not enough for frontier models

After having worked with Opus 4.7 for a while I accidentially continued a session that was using Sonnet 4.5 and it felt just very dumb. The replies were much shallower than what I was used to, context was ingored, mistakes were made. I don't think there is a big difference between Opus 4.6 and 4.8, but to Sonnet 4.5 the difference is palpable.