Checking different models once every quarter is exactly what made me move to claude code.
CC is a better implementation and seems to be fairly economic with token usage. That is the really the only defining point and, I suspect, Anthropic are going to have a lot of trouble staying relevant with all the product issues.
They were far ahead for a brief period in November/December which is driving the hype cycle that now appears to be collapsing the company.
You have to test at least every month, things are moving quickly. Stepfun is releasing soon and seems to have an Opus-level model with more efficient architecture.
One example is I have a multi-stage distillation/knowledge extraction script for taking a Discord channel and answering questions. I have a hardcoded 5k message test set where I set up 20 questions myself based on analyzing it.
In my harness Minimax wasn't even getting half of them right, whereas Sonnet was 100%. Granted this isn't code, but my usage on pi felt about the same.
What are you using to drive the Chinese models in order to evaluate this? OpenCode?
Some of Claude Code's features, like remote sessions, are far more important than the underlying model for my productivity.
CC tool usage is also significantly ahead imo (doesn't negate the price but it is something). I have seen issues with heavy thinking models (like Minimax) and client implementations with poor tool usage (like Cline).
CC has had a period over the last six months of delivering significant value...but, of course, you can just use CC with OpenRouter.
I keep coming back to it because I can run it as a manager for the smaller tasks.
Agentic workflows do have a place in well-defined, structured tasks...but I don't think that is what most people are trying to do with it.