As of , you should be using...
I'm on a budget.
$100/$200 Claude plan + $20 ChatGPT plan is the best value.
What about Gemini 3.0 Pro?
It's fine. Use it if you want a second opinion on logic compared to 5.2 xhigh.
What if I'm curing cancer or proving theorems?
5.2 Pro
What about Cursor?
It's mid.
But aren't some models "better at" design or frontend or backend?
They're all going to produce mostly slop. Hire your designer buddy if you really care.
What about grep and semantic search models and Composer-1 and Flash 3.0?
They're okay I guess. Waste of time to worry about it.
What about [my favorite OSS/3rd party CLI harness]?
They're okay I guess. Waste of time to worry about it.
What about running models locally?
Why would you do that to yourself.
What about [benchmark]?
Benchmarks are meaningless at this point.
Is this list biased?
Yes.
Seriously no other tools to recommend?