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Comment by owlninja | Hacker News Reader

Same here. I see so many people obsessing over the latest most state of the art bleeding edge models and yelling at Google for not being there, but I feel like the vast majority of people don't actually need those models. Flash has just been super useful and incredibly fast in my experience.

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I prefer luna for most development, especially when I am guiding the process. Sometimes terra. I have had terrible results coding with sol. It is way over-tuned on RL to make something that completes the task, no matter what. I end up with way too much code that does a lot of things I didn't ask for.

Try planning with Luna, implementing with Sol with guidelines to not exceed the given scope.

Sounds counter-intuitive at first, but Luna is overall better at sticking with what works. Sol is wicked smart but needs constraints.

IME you're supposed to have Sol drive Luna sub-agents to do 90% of the work. Sol should primarily be the verifier and goal setter. Use omp.sh with Task Delegation -> Always to strongly encourage Sol to drive Lunas. Also Luna prefers to be talked to with English in XML.

I love Luna too. An excellent model and still usually better value per dollar than Gemini if you pay for API tokens. Things may change with 3.8 - we'll know soon.

I setup Luna as main Claude Code driver (so zero anthropic api use) and it nailed crisply a handful of python tasks, gonna continue this way.

Why not use codex or an open source harness?

That is a very valid question. I happen to want to get Claude Code muscle memory under my belt for professional reasons in addition to get side projects advanced, could have settled for Codex else. Also OpenCode with eastern models gets part of the job done. In CC beyond using Luna for the cheap, I am using DeepSeek flash v4 for subagents, that is a further cost shaver. Not sure if in Codex I could do that.

And much better bang for the buck, as well.

When I read all the issues people have with Claude - the aggressive guardrails, the cost, how quickly it burns tokens - it seems almost masochistic to use it. Just seems like herd behavior - people use it because everyone else is using it, and because they believe it’s the “best”, whatever that means. (Benchmarks certainly don’t help define that.)

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