alt Hacker NewsPersonally I found my usage of llms bimodal, I only have uses for the top frontier models (for research and development) or for the cheapest and fastest ones (to use in production for consolidated, simple flows). I am curious what people find the mid tier models useful for.
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I have some tasks that deserve a bit more reasoning but for a long time most of my needs have been met by mid-range models, rather than the big ones. There's barely any motivation for me these days to use something more advanced than Terra on low/medium for everyday work. For a personal agent doing occasional coding, I'm still on Mimo flash.
I think many people still expect their tasks to need something more fancy, but could do with a reset of expectations and try to go much lower.
Same, I either use xhigh on best model, or use cheapest and fastest models (mercury/jev/haiku/luna)
Production pipelines for non-coding usage. Jagged edge is very real. Just one example, loads of tasks where Gemma 4 26ba4b wipes the floor with Deepseek Flash v4.1. On Artificial Analysis-like benchmarks, the latter is many times more "intelligent". Not everything in the world is coding and math, but those are easy to "measure". Things that are hard to measure aren't part of their benchmarks.
I feel like people use medium models thinking they are saving money, but in the end, it ends up wasting more time and tokens theough the increased rate of issues/bugs.
If the highest tier model makes even one or two fewer mistakes that require human intervantion, that almost makes it a no-brainer choice for production.