Six months testing too many frontier coding models on real client work. The TL;DR: stop chasing the best one.
My default: Claude Opus 4.7. First-attempt correctness beats every alternative I've measured, usually by a lot. Max subscribers, the analysis ends there.
The rest of the field:
→ Codex 5.4: competent but painfully slow. Nothing it produces justifies the wait.
→ Gemini 3 Pro: gorgeous UIs, then invents APIs that don't exist when you wire them to anything real.
→ Grok Code Fast: fast, good at single functions, falls apart on whole projects.
Cost tiers:
→ No constraints: Opus for everything.
→ Cost-aware: Opus/Codex for planning, Sonnet/Grok Code Fast for execution.
→ Cost is a major factor: K2.6 or GLM 5.1 to orchestrate, DeepSeek v4 or Qwen3 Coder Plus for subtasks.
Recent personal benchmark: same prompt, same refinement, same web game:
→Codex Spark: 94s. Looked great. Critical rules bug.
→Claude Opus: 12m 34s. Worked first try. Fun.
→GLM 5.1: 14m 27s. One mode never worked.
Speed is meaningless if the code is broken.
Pick one model. Get good at it. Stop shopping. You'll solve 80% of what hits you with whatever you've genuinely learned. Pay for the premium tier, $200/mo sounds steep until you waste a week getting throttled. One IDE, one terminal, one workflow. Learn the whole stack: agents, skills, configuration.
I have 5 IDEs, 4 terminals, and more subscriptions than I can track. It's ridiculous. Don't be me.
Full breakdown: answerrocket.com/code-faster-wi…
What are you actually running?
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