You Don't Need Opus: The Smaller Models That Are Eating AI's Lunch
There’s a dirty secret in the AI agent world: most teams running Claude Opus are burning money for bragging rights. Don’t get me wrong — Opus 4.6 is a beast. It tops SWE-bench at 80.9%, handles 200K context windows without breaking a sweat, and orchestrates multi-tool workflows like a conductor with perfect pitch. But at $15 per million tokens (blended), it’s the filet mignon of language models. And most of us are building tacos. ...