I’m writing a lot of React code and find that the cheaper models are pretty terrible. Maybe I’m holding it wrong but the experience that the cheaper model is usually enough just track with my experience. Worse, I find predicting the difficulty of tasks exceedingly difficult. More often than not using the initially cheaper models requires me to reroll with a more expensive one or waste a lot of times and tokens cleaning up the subpar results. With OpenAI and Anthropic still subsiding tokens, not using the best models still seems like a tough ask.
What happens when you find the models are terrible? The claimed results don't match? My dev cycle tends to be write a test for blah blah, add feature to satisfy test, make sure tests pass.