alt Hacker NewsI think you should try an OpenAI model like GPT 5.5. It is better at following instructions and boundaries set during prompt. It feels like a more capable "agent assistant" than Claude models but without loss of intelligence.
Most of my work involves "Agentic engineering" instead of fire-and-forget. I like to stay involved during the planning as well as review and ask a lot more questions from the agent than I've seen others doing. In a way, I'm using the agent in a sort of "hyper auto-complete" mode to fill in the blanks (rather big blanks) once I've set out the requirements, scope and design (sometimes specific module boundaries). This works best for me.
I prefer GPT 5.5 to Opus but both are absurdly expensive token hogs, I can't afford to use either as my main model at $work with the monthly spend cap we have.
I use Composer (since we use Cursor) or GPT 5.3-codex as my workhorse models and only break out the big guns when I have a genuinely difficult problem to solve.
IMO somewhat weirdly 5.3-codex might be the best overall coding model OpenAI have ever released. It's 90% as good as 5.5 and costs about 20% as much, since it's both cheaper per token and uses fewer tokens for the same task.
I'll miss it when they inevitably deprecate it, but hopefully I can use Kimi K2.7 by then