> Today's models are now good enough for high-quality unattended tasks. Chasing the latest and greatest is silly. It is fun to see the new Fable capabilities, but the tasks we throw at them are usually ridiculous (maybe even insulting) if you believe in LLM sentience. It's like asking a math PhD to organize the files on your desktop.
I'm using DS V4.1 Flash as my main model since their release and it works great for all my coding tasks. My setup is OpenCode Go subscription and obra/superpowers skill.
The only times I try to change models are on general planning tasks (like research this codebase for tech debt mitigation opportunities) or if I need deep research which would benefit from searching the web, in which I still think Gemini is still the best because of the speed and access to google search index. But these are not even 20% of my daily tasks.
I've had middling success with models like DS V4.1 Flash and free Gemini. They tend to be pretty good at very easy stuff ... but they're more likely to go down rabbit holes, confidently assert falsehoods, or fix bugs with changes to my test harness rather than my code.
I asked about comparison to the well-known SotA models specifically because I use either Astra or Sol for ~85% of my daily tasks. When I try to use smaller/cheaper models, I have had very mixed success. Sometimes it's perfect, while other times it fails in subtle and hard to catch ways.
but DS 4.1 Flash is good enough for most tasks