> but finding myself asking Sonnet to rewrite 90% of the code GLM was giving me. At some point I was like "what the hell am I doing" and just switched.
This is a very common sequence of events.
The frontier hosted models are so much better than everything else that it's not worth messing around with anything lesser if doing this professionally. The $20/month plans go a long way if context is managed carefully. For a professional developer or consultant, the $200/month plan is peanuts relative to compensation.
For many companies. They’d be better to pay $200/month and layoff 1% of the workforce to pay for it.
what tools / processes do you use to manage context
Until last week, you would've been right. Kimi K2.5 is absolutely competitive for coding.
Unless you include it in "frontier", but that has usually been used to refer to "Big 3".