alt Hacker News> people are just using the latest and most expensive models because they can, and because they’re cargo-culting. This is perhaps the first time that software has had this kind of problem, and coders are not exactly demonstrating great discretionary decision making.
> I’ve been using Anthropic models exclusively for the last month on a large, realistic codebase, and I can count the number of times I needed to use Opus on one hand. Most of the time, Haiku is fine. About 10% of the time I splurge for Sonnet, and honestly, even some of those are unnecessary.
You and I couldn't have more different experiences. Opus 4.7 on the max setting still gets lost and chokes on a lot of my tasks.
I switch to Sonnet for simpler tasks like refactoring where I can lay out all of the expectations in detail, but even with Opus 4.7 I can often go through my entire 5-hour credit limit just trying to get it to converge on a reasonable plan. This is in a medium size codebase.
For the people putting together simple web apps using Sonnet with a mix of Haiku might be fine, but we have a long way to go with LLMs before even the SOTA models are trustworthy for complex tasks.
I don’t use Haiku for planning of big tasks, so we basically agree on that. But even just Sonnet 4.6, on a fairly large codebase, only truly goes into the weeds maybe 10% of the time for me. I also write pretty specific initial prompts, and have a good idea of how I want the code to work before I start prompting. For example, sometimes I will spend several hours writing a spec before even picking up the power tools.
I have never had the situation you describe, where Opus won’t come up with “a reasonable plan”, but your definition of “reasonable” might be very different than mine, and of course, running through your credit limit is an entirely tangential problem.