alt Hacker NewsEver since the insane discount with GPT-5.6 Luna, not much excites me anymore. I mean just look at the benchmarks, even though Gemini 3.7 Flash performs well on the DeepSWE 1.1, Luna (Max) still performs way better. I personally have stuck to Luna (Xhigh) because its been more than enough and does not bloat up the context window too fast with reasoning tokens.
> Starting January 1, 2027, $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens will apply.
Compare this to Luna which is at $0.2/1M input ($0.02 cached) and $1.2/1M output.
Replies
I practically switched to doing everything with Luna or DeepSeek V4 flash. I haven't feel the need for the more expensive models.
luna is the first model that has outdone gpt-5-mini on the pareto frontier for some of my high value, cost sensitive ai product workflows. it's both cheaper (by about 60% in real world use) and higher quality based on my test harnesses. I was really worried that costs would go up since there wasn't a replacement as of a few weeks ago and gpt-5-mini is scheduled to be sunset toward the end of the year. So long as they don't randomly sunset this model anytime soon, that worry has now subsided.
I'm curious how much people are manually curating context these days; I'm increasingly feeling for myself that it being auto-managed inside a front-end like claude code is not ideal, and I'd rather have more control over what exact files and pieces of discovery go into a particular prompt, and the ability to more easily "fork" a session and ask asides or make notes/todos in a way that doesn't disrupt or confuse a more focused task going on.
I don't think I want a gastown-style "just yolo everything" approach, in fact I really want more control over how decisions are made and with what info. Does this exist?
Benchmarks mean very little. The difference between Luna and Sol in the real world is massive.
> does not bloat up the context window too fast with reasoning tokens
How much does that matter if it's reset at every turn?
GPT-5.6 Luna is an insanely powerful model for its price. It's been great for coding workflows where I guide the LLM's hand step by step. It's also insane to see my weekly limit drop by than 2% after an hour of coding ever since the discount.
However, I've noticed 2 drawbacks with Luna. Context rot is much more palpable than Terra and Sol. It tends to get confused and go into rabbit holes when it's context gets filled up. In addition, when instructions are vague, it performs poorly and tends to write way to more code than necessary, but that is to be expected of smaller models. In all, for clearly defined, bite-sized coding tasks, Luna's price-to-performance has been insane. It might have very well commanded the price tag of Sol if it came out just a year ago.