alt Hacker News> Every time a thread about LLMs comes up, there are tons of people in the comments insisting that they're getting just as good results from the latest DeepSeek/qwen/whatever as with Opus, and that just hasn't been my experience at all: open-source models just fall over completely compared to Claude when asked to do anything remotely complicated.
Different usage patterns - you want to issue a single spec then walk away and come back later (when it has consumed $10k worth of API tokens inside your $200/m subscription) to a finished product.
Many people issue a spec for a single function, a single class or similar. When you break it down like that, the advantages of SOTA models shrinks.
My experience is that in medium/big codebases even with single functions going with the xhigh is basically better from a user perspective (faster to get the result, and you can trust it) while going with lower models(e.g. sonnet instead of opus) you have to always carefully review the output because 1 of 10 it will hallucinate, you won't catch it immediately and at some point it will bite you.