I disagree heartily with everything here, both in personal experience from the models, and in values about coding.
I don't care bout cost, I care about getting good results fast.
Cost per line of code is not a suitable metric for anything. It's as silly as measuring engineers' performance by lines of code. More lines of code is worse than fewer lines of code. When you say "we have verified" whoever that "we" is makes a big difference, but you're posting pseudonymously, how are we to even guess at that "we"?
I get better results with some older cheaper models, faster. In particular older Claude models than Opus 4.7. Maybe the more expensive model churns out more lines, more complexity faster. That is a worse outcome for me. The complexity must be avoided at all costs. The simpler, smaller, answer is always better, and scales to bigger code bases. The more the model guesses at intent rather than checking intent, the more the model is clever rather than clear and simple, the worse the outcome, the more that the model turns into an architecture astronaut, the worse the outcome.
Yes, cost per line of code itself is an error.
Only cost for effective* outcome matters. And if your lines of code have a cost, you would want fewer lines of code to achieve the outcome, not more.
Are you sure you disagree with that?
* If your place of work starts talking "efficiency"**, run. Find somewhere the conversation is *effectiveness* — at the goal/outcome level.
** Not to mention that "efficiencies" is MBA speak for "right sizing" away effectiveness.
I’d point out that smaller and simpler also makes their router code easier to review and that fewer lines will have fewer bugs (on average) and those bugs will be more obvious. But then, I’m old school and won’t let an AI work on code without reviewing it, and I mostly write code by hand.