I don’t love the “forced upon them” framing; if that’s really how people are thinking about it then maybe they should pause and reflect for a moment yhat it isn’t their money being spent. Amd the default isn’t always having the latest and greatest, it’s not paying for anything at all.

Now, if the debate is really about which option is more cost effective, then we could easily run an A/B test to find out. Though TBH my instinct is that that experiment is likely to cost more than the potential cost savings.

What I will say is that my own sense from experimenting around in a non-rigorous way is that the answer depends on how you use the tool. For actual vibecoding you should always go for the SOTA model because it will need less oversight. It’s also less likely to get stuck in a vicious loop that fruitlessly wastes tokens. But for a more hands-on approach where you move in small, carefully planned increments that you review and test in human-comprehensible chunks, smaller models may be preferable. SOTA ones don’t do that much better when working that way, and the slower inference adds a detrimental amount of friction to the work cycle.