I stopped using the smartest AI models. Programming got faster and cheaper.

Vacations give you time to think and explore. I came across a few things and made a few discoveries of my own. It turns out that, as a programmer, I no longer need the smartest and most expensive AI models. Apparently, there is such a thing as "Cost per Task", and by that metric GPT-5.6 Luna (max) has taken the top spot. If you use Codex, though, it is the dumbest model on the list. Its Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index is only 38. For comparison, the smartest model, GPT-6 Astra (max), scores 53. In the end, a completed task costs 0.18 with Luna, compared with 3.26 with Astra. That is a difference of almost 20 times. As I understand it, the "Cost per Task" benchmark works like this: you give the model a normal, well-written task and measure how many tokens it takes to complete it. In other words, not something like "turn a vague mess into a spec", but a well-formed question that already contains half the answer. https://preview.redd.it/djv4x0lfk9qh1.png?width=1122&format=png&auto=webp&s=198f71c2e74c3538cc81c310f4577455d7cc4af4 At first I did not believe it, so I started working with the dumbest model in the Luna lineup. And do you know what happened? I stopped running out of my limits for five-hour periods and my weekly limits. On a plan that costs 20 bucks a month, for crying out loud! :) Even though I am a programmer, Codex does not send me in circles, and I do not have to switch to a smarter model just to get it to complete a task I have already asked it to do five times. I see many nonprogrammer vibe coders handle the situation the same way: if the AI keeps sending you in circles, turn on a smarter model and it will definitely solve the problem. Yes, that works for unskilled programmers. For skilled programmers, it makes no sense, unless they have gotten lazy and switched off their brains altogether. So this is where we are: even the cheapest and dumbest frontier models have become smart enough. If you know your stuff, their level is more than enough. It looks like the race to build the smarter model is coming to an end. But I ran into another problem: speed. This is especially noticeable on DeepInfra and OpenRouter. Right now, generation speed on reasonably good models averages 25 to 50 tokens per second. Even Luna takes 5 to 15 minutes on average to complete a task in Codex. That is painfully slow for agent mode. It starts to get annoying. If you use DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash directly through the DeepSeek API, speeds can reach 300 tokens per second. Notice the difference: the task takes less than a minute, not five minutes. If the task is difficult, it takes only five minutes instead of fifteen. When you are a programmer, you start a task and want the AI to finish it as quickly as possible. That is much more comfortable than waiting five to fifteen minutes. At the same time, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash has an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index of 40, which is two points higher than Luna's. Overall, the next stage in the development of agentic AI is speed. For now, Chinese models are winning. But as I understand it, American LLM providers have some surprises in store for us. Anthropic seems to have problems with this, but OpenAI will apparently soon have data centers where speeds will be measured in thousands of tokens per second. Imagine: you used to assign a task and wait for minutes, but now everything is ready in 10 to 30 seconds. Business at the speed of thought :) You have only just come up with an idea and thought it through, and the result is already ready for review :) Do you remember what the race for larger context windows looked like? "We have 65,000 tokens!" "We have 250,000!" "We have half a million!" "We have a context window with 1 million tokens!" Well, folks, I think the race is over. There is no point in making it larger. In fact, it was the growth of context windows that led to the emergence of AI coding agents. As they worked through a task, they kept expanding the context and could do something useful after 20 to 30 cycles, reaching 500,000 or 1 million tokens. The main problem now is that an AI agent has to study the code and the repository rules from scratch for every new task before it can do what you asked. Eighty percent of its work goes into figuring out what is going on all over again, and only 20 percent goes into changing the code. And all because of the damn context window with 1 million tokens, which has to be reset completely and started over every time. So everyone now understands that, ideally, we need some kind of long-term memory. Then the context window becomes infinite. So if a model does not have to start from scratch because its context window overflowed, the longer it works with a codebase, the more it builds up a general understanding of where everything is in the project. So yes, give us a stateful LLM. I am tired of your stateless LLMs! And, by the way, people are already working on this, and several projects are underway. The market is ready, and I think this will be the next stage, rather than expanding context windows to 2 or 3 million tokens. By the way, a question. How have your programming habits changed in light of recent events? For example, since I no longer need fancy IDE features, I stopped paying for JetBrains subscriptions and switched to Zed IDE. It is free, supports the same shortcuts as JetBrains, and I mostly use it to look at code diffs and navigate the source tree. I also use Codex and Claude Code less and less. They pull in too much irrelevant stuff and bloat the context, distracting the LLM from the task. I switched to the Pi harness. It has a minimal set of tools: editing code, running commands, and so on. As a result, even the simplest request to an LLM, such as "hi", uses about 3,000 tokens in Pi on average. Codex uses 18,000, and Claude Code uses 30,000. At this point, it does not even matter which one uses less. What matters is that the model understands the task less well when it is distracted by a more bloated context. What stack have you ended up with? And more generally, what do you think comes next? What should we expect from AI products for programming? Where is all this going? submitted by /u/ievkz [link] [comments]

Source: r/ollama | 2026-09-18

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