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Comment by kgwgk | Hacker News Reader

For coding like for everything else in life cost is a factor.

Cost for the value delivered. Like if you offered the current SOTA open source models at $0.1/M, I still think I'd be using Opus or 5.5 at $30/M. Or say GPT 5 which was released Aug 25, I don't think I'd use it for coding for even $0.1. I'd def find other uses for it(translations, agentic workflows, prompt guards etc), but for coding I don't think I'd ever completely switch to a SOTA open model

Unless ofc there was an actual speed difference, only reason I'd be willing to go with a worse model couple of percent worse than current best model is if the speed was at least 5x higher. Looking forward to kimi k2.6 offered publicly by Cerebras

> I still think I'd be using

That's fine. Other people may not want to pay 300x more and will rather make do with last year's SOTA.

> For coding you always want to go with the best model

Maybe you meant "For coding I always want to go with the best model"?

Based on current market for LLMs I'd say my use of "you" in the general is fine. Even openrouter which doesn't capture all of the SOTA closed models but nearly all of opensource model usage has Opus as 1st(on last week) on "Programming" category and 3rd in overall rankings

https://openrouter.ai/rankings

I'd trust the OpenRouter rankings a lot more if they exposed the number of unique users for each model, as opposed to just a token count.

Currently I have no way of telling if big changes in their rankings are caused by a single "whale" switching providers, or if it's a more meaningful trend.

My point was that even openrouter, the one place people who are looking for open source SOTA models go to, doesn't definitively have opensource models at the top. Esp considering quite a lot of the closed models usage is through AWS, GCP , Azure etc, probably dwarfing the usage on openrouter by a huge factor

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