[all2]

My options are 1) pay about a dollar per query from a frontier model, or 2) pay a fraction of that for a not-so-great model that makes my token spend last days/weeks instead of hours.

I spend a lot of time on plans, but unfortunately the gotchas are in the weeds, especially when it comes to complex systems. I don't trust these models with even marginally complex, non-standard architectures (my projects center around statecharts right now, and the semantics around those can get hairy).

I git commit after each feature/bugfix, so we're on the same page here. If a feature is too big, or is made up of more than one "big" change, I chunk up the work and commit in small batches until the feature is complete.

I'm running golang for my projects right now. I can try a more strongly typed language, but that means learning a whole new language and its gotchas and architectural constraints.

Right now I use claude-code-router and Claude Code on top of openrouter, so swapping models is trivial. I use mostly Grok-4.1 Fast or Kimi 2.5. Both of these choke less than Anthropic's own Sonnet (which is still more expensive than the two alternatives).