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My approach to this problem is to just...not try them all.

As long as the model you're using solves the problems you have to your satisfaction, there is no need to try any other models, except for financial reasons maybe.

So I start with a relatively cheap model (GLM 5.3 flash for me) and as long as it accomplishes the task (it did so far) I don't have to change. And even if it can't do something, the first thing I change is see if I can give it more tools or better context (useful even if I switch models later) or trying a different approach to the problem.

If google/gemma-4-31b works, you don't need to overthink it.

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I use Gemini(s) because I can send pdfs as files to their API and not worry too much. I've started to diverge and consacrate a part of my pipeline to sending image based pdf pages to glm flash 5.3, not sure how to address / test it properly.

Long term I have fears I can't depend of the Google's AI api.

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Starting with GLM-5.3 Flash was a pretty decent first try! I started with other models, and ended up settling on this exact one because all the others were either too slow or unreliable for my tasks. Qwen 3.8 didn't do it for me, whatever tweaks I added to my harness. Where I'm getting at is you did start with an incredible model in the first place, which greatly helps sticking to it.
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satisficing instead of optimising
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> If google/gemma-4-31b works, you don't need to overthink it.

Up until recently I had a gemini flash 2.0 api deployed that did summarization and translation of news articles/corporate statements fast and cheap and had no reason to update it.

If it works fine, this chase of the latest LLM is bit pointless.

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This 100%
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I use claude for work, and opencode go at home, but i do dabble with openrouter from time to time, and then i just browse the model catalog and filter/sort by recent popularity, price, context size or whatever matters for the task.

Mstly just popularity trends, hoping that there's some wisdom in the crowd.

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Have you tried openrouters auto model? Tries to give you the best model based on prompt and price

https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/openclaw-i...

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For TTS I launched this like this week based on a Reddit thread of recommendations, added a new one to it.. I want to say on Wednesday, but this week has been a blur. Problem I’ve found with similar sites is I can’t run a lot of the models, or the results are beyond stale.

But this is only stuff I can run locally, or it’s a cloud model.

So.. This is good for right now!

https://apimade.com/audio-compare.html

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It's the same problem as trying to buy a car or choose what clothes to buy. You just have to read about options, try things out.
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