If you pay API prices for inference in your product stack & have specific use-cases w/ custom evals, these smaller models provide an additional cost/speed lever to adjust. Ultimately, I think the point is to compete on cost for use-cases where Sol on the lowest reasoning is overkill.
If you have a fairly straightforward usecase where Terra performs just as well as Sol, but is faster and cheaper, why not use it?
Spinning up a fresh session would be a reasonable choice in the above case, but sometimes you still need the retained context.
Benchmarks don’t really tell you much. For API best will always be a model+effort sweep on your internal evals (and if you don’t have internal evals, do that first).
For individual coding harnesses, honestly I just go with vibes. The best workflow is the one that works for you.
On subscription for coding and stuff I am basically on Astra Ultra all day long.
Take a look at this reply.
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/suppo...
2. There are rote or simple tasks where higher reasoning isn't needed and one model vs the other wouldn't even be distinguishable.
3. How many tokens are used during reasoning depends as much on the task as the reasoning level.
4. Sonnet is faster and half the price per token, so Opus will only be cheaper if it can spend fewer tokens. This won't be the case for all tasks. Opus and Sonnet will also consume the same number of tokens to load context, so the relative price comparison depends a lot on where the task is context-heavy or reasoning-heavy.
What are you smoking and can I have some?
I have some business automation process for some customers that I maintain, where Terra with low reasoning ended up with the best price/performance & latency. With an equivalent Luna with high reasoning, price was usually better, but quality had a higher variance (very much depends on where the thinking takes the model) and latency for high reasoning was worse.
if you're just talking about use in codex or claude code, then sure, leave it on opus all the time. but for running routine api requests, sonnet is great.
I think it's also a fake lever to give to finops / it teams to try and keep costs down.
To justify the pricing of Sol and Astra. Old business trick.