In my experience, it is claude-code paired with deepseek-v4. For penny-pinchers like me, I can have long coding sessions with it with no anxiety about the cost. Also, prompting it to what you want and verifying the outputs is more important than the quality of the model. So, I am better off with a cheaper model and taking the responsibility for prompting it and verifying the results.

Cursor with Composer 2.5 seems to be competitive with frontier models (Opus and GPT-5.5) for a significant price discount. Benchmarks are gamed, as always, but $0.55/task vs $11.02 a task definitely indicates that there's some cost advantage.

https://cursor.com/evals

I've gone through ~600m tokens in Xiaomi Mimo though Claude, and it's been the most effective use of an agent I've had yet. It's very capable, but generally not ambitious, picking simple but effective solutions to most problems I give it. Going to write something longer about the experience when I get to a billion tokens.

Seems to be DeepSeek.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237663

Although I have little interest in agentic coding, when I do use it, I have found Kimi K2.6 to give Opus-quality output, and have switched entirely to it for pretty much everything.

Kimi 2.6 is great. Qwen3.7-max benchmarks similarly but I havent used it yet

For me, it's by far Deepseek. It's many times cheaper than competitors, and about as good as Sonnet 4.6.

Just use codex with 5.5 on low reasoning levels