Isn’t this obvious? When you have a task you think is hard. You give it to a cleverer model. When a task is straight forward you give it to an older one.
If I have a straight forward task, I give it to an LLM.
If I have a task I think is hard, I plan how I will tackle it, and then handle it myself in a series of steps.
LLM usage has become an end in itself in your development process.
As evidenced by furious posters on r/cursor, who make every prompt to super-opus-thinking-max+++ and are astonished when they have blown their monthly request allowance in about a day.
If I need another pair of (artificial) eyes on a difficult debugging problem, I’ll occasionally use a premium model sparingly. For chore tasks or UI layout tweaks, I’ll use something more economical (like grok-4-fast or claude-4.5-haiku - not old models but much cheaper).
What is unclear from the presentation is wether they do this or not. Do teams that use Sonnet 4.5 just always use it, and teams on Sonnet 4.0 likewise? Or do individuals decided which model to use on a per task basis.
Personally I tend to default to just 1, and only go to an alternative if it gets stuck or doesn't get me what I want.
What I definitely do care about is speed and efficiency. I recently canceled CoPilot to go back to Cursor, it's just so much faster for the inline code completion.
When I do have something difficult, I open four browser tabs and copy paste a big long promp into the free versions of the top models so I can take my time reasoning out their answers.
I use agents when I have a basic task that I can easily judge their output in code review.