I've been a hardcore claude-4-sonnet + Cursor fan for a long time, but in the last 2 months my usage went through the roof. I started with the basic Cursor subscription, then upgraded to pro, until I hit usage limits again. Then I started using my own Claude API key but I was still paying ~70$ / 5 days, which is not that sustainable for me. But since grok-code-fast-1 landed, I've been using it daily with Cursor and it's fantastic, fast and cheap (free so far). I've also been using GPT-5 lately through the official Codex VSCode extension, and it blows my mind. Last night I used gpt-5-medium to help me heavily refactor a react-native app, improved it's structure and overall performance, something that would've taken me at least 2 days. Now I'm testing out gpt-5-medium-codex, asked it to restructure the entire app routing, and it seems it makes a lot of tool calls, understands, executes commands, it's very organized. Overall my stack from now on is Cursor + grok-code-fast-1 for daily use, and Codex/GPT when I need the brainz. Worth noting that I abused gpt-5-medium all day long yesterday, and I never hit any kind of limit (I just used by ChatGPT Plus account), reason for which I thank the OpenAI team
What exactly did your work flow look like for the gpt-5-medium refactor you did?
I don't have a test like that on hand so I'm really curious what all you prompted the model, what it suggested, and how much your knowledge as a SWE enabled that workflow.
I'd like a more concrete understanding if the mind blowing nature is attainable for any average SWE, an average Joe that tinkers, or only a top decile engineer.
I also hit Cursor usage limits for the first time in a year. Hit limits on Claude, GPT, and then it started using Grok :)
I chose to turn on Cursor's pay per usage within the Pro plan (so I paid $25, $20+$5 usage, instead of upgrading to $60/m) in order to keep using Claude because it's faster than Grok
I've landed on more or less the same. grok-code-fast-1 has been working well for most coding tasks. I use it in opencode (I guess it's free for some amount of time? Because I haven't added any grok keys ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)