alt Hacker NewsHow many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you:
1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes
2) Review everything and point them in the right direction
Large models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough.
The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough attention. Does not matter which model.
So why bother with big models, when flash models are 10x cheaper and much faster to iterate under guidance? Large models can be used for security and bug audits. Flash models work almost the same for changes under 300 LOC when you dictate how you want your code to look.
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Is your argument that $1500 / mo is too much? Why would the engineering team not be more rigorous in their model selection given a constraint?
The easy decision is to just go with the biggest SOTA model you can afford.
But this overlooks the other critical part of getting the most out of these things: the harness. I run an autonomous plan/design/code/build/test pipeline with agents using my own orchestrator. Different models are better at different stages, and I use LLMs to judge the output between them. Not everything needs Opus 4.8.
The harness provides both the scaffolding to get the right things into the model, and the right things out. But it also lets you dictate which model does which work.
It's the pipeline, not the model, that gets you quality at a given token budget.
I wonder to what extent models should figure out which model to forward a query to. Or perhaps the big models could learn the difference between an easy and a hard question and charge accordingly? Perhaps, if it can measure complexity, even generate a quote?
Small models are fine for small coding tasks but I don't see why big ones can't be broken down most of the time.
This a thousand times. The bigger models also have a habit of overcomplicating things.
I'm legit annoyed at opus 4.8 at any setting above 4.8.
I believe it can be great for vibe coding, but mundane day work? Hell no, I'd rather work with Haiku. It's too slow, checks too many things, it's annoying as hell.
> Don't ask LLMs for big changes
> Review everything and point them in the right direction
Sorry upper management doesn't care. That's an engineering problem that you need to solve.
It's pretty simple; organizations are willing to tolerate paying $1500/month/engineer, which seems to be roughly inline with "normal" consumption for most full-time engineers. If that number grows significantly, then I bet companies will start exploring flash models more, as you propose.