alt Hacker NewsFor programming, I care about correctness and intelligent/robust design at the expense of all else
I'd rather wait all day for an impeccable implementation of a single feature than get 10 features worth of "okayish" code
Replies
ghc • today at 12:36 AM
Ok, but as parent said, not every use case is programming. If I want a model to extract or guess column's units from CSV header names plus the column's first 5 values, I don't need Opus 5.5, do I?
thinkcontext • yesterday at 11:11 PM
You have the harness pick the appropriate model for the appropriate task. Most high level software development projects can be broken down into tasks, many which do not need the smartest model.
For programming, sure. There are oodles of tasks that you can defer to AI for that aren't nearly as picky though.
For example, suppose you have a list of questions in a CSV, and you just want to categorize them by the "type" of question (e.g. technical, bureaucratic, procedural, a mixture, etc). You could have Fable do it, and it will work, but it probably won't work significantly better than Haiku, or even one of the cheaper Qwen or Deepseek models.
A lot of my AI usage does boil down to that. I use Opus for most of the actual tasks involving writing code, but for more mechanical and less complicated stuff I prefer the speed and the lower usage of my tokens and defer to Sonnet or Haiku.