I Found the Performance–Cost–Speed Sweet Spot With LLMs

🤝 I have spent an unreasonable amount of time using large language models. Most of that time went to Anthropic and OpenAI, with plenty of Kimi and Qwen mixed in. I used them for research, writing, coding, and long agent runs. I finally have a default for GPT-5.6 Sol reasoning effort: High in Fast mode. That sounds like a small choice. It took me months to make it because I kept assuming that the strongest setting must be the best one. It is not. Max can be smarter and still make me less productive. I kept choosing the highest reasoning effort Until this year, I was completely Anthropic-pilled. Claude was the model I opened first. That changed after the Fable 5 incident. Anthropic released Fable 5, suspended it days later, and later brought it back with new safeguards. I continued to use Anthropic after that. Opus 4.8 was good. Fable 5 was often very good, but too verbose for my taste. Then came Opus 5. Yes, it is good. I still do not like it. It is somewhat slow and, gosh, it is hard…