TBH they are smart enough for me; I want more speed and more initiative (e.g. my Opus one shot should not have terrible perf that it can itself fix with a simple prompt "it's OOMing, fix it"; it should proactively write the performant code).

The challenge is that our bar for "smart" keeps going up and up.

If you compare to "smart" from a year ago, you have endless options that are basically free at this point which outperform everything from a year ago.

Deepseek Flash V4.1, Sonnet 5.5, GPT6 Luna, etc are really strong for the cost.

I heard Argon was bad at executing plans but good at making them. Sounds like a potent combination to me.