Comment by bscphil

My experience has been that the "cost per task" estimate wildly underestimates the cost of top models on most real work, because the tasks (as I understand it) tend to be isolated bits of problem solving or code generation, which rewards writing code that works the first time and not generating too many reasoning tokens. Sol is great for both. However, a lot of real work involves tracking down bugs, working through tests, examining many parts of a codebase, refactoring... even with subagents and good tool use this tends to bloat context before the problem gets solved. Deepseek's absurdly low cache price really shines in these instances, but even GLM 5.3 Flash easily beats the top models on price in real world usage. Maybe that's different if you factor in subscriptions.