Where do I start?
We have Gemini 4 Hydrogen. But it sounds like you could use Claude Sonnet 5.5. Or maybe 5.4; it really depends. Have you tried Opus? We have Opus 5.2 right now. It's similar to Fable 5.2, but better for day-to-day work. It's not quite as powerful as Mythos 5.2, though. I hear the gap will narrow eventually. Opus scores 94.8 on a benchmark, while Mythos gets 96.1. Fable is a respectable 92.7, assuming you don't ask it to do anything too ambitious.
Have you tried the Chinese models? DeepSeek is pretty good. You might want to start with the R1 family to test the waters before moving on to V4. Personally, I'm a Flash kind of guy, but Pro is pretty good too. The crowd favorite is GLM these days. You've got to try 5.3 Flash. Its Mixture-of-Experts architecture is state of the art, in my opinion. It scores an impressive 87.3 on the Benchmark Performance Index.
But let's be serious for a minute. You're probably looking for ChatGPT. Astra is overkill unless you want to do some damage. I'd stick with GPT-6.0 Terra, not Sol! That one ate through my budget in three days. Terra gets 98.2 on the Enterprise Productivity Benchmark, while Sol gets 99.1. That extra 0.9 will cost you $14,000 a month. So go with Luna if you must.
If you're feeling more adventurous, you could go with Qwen, though. I'd stick with 3.8 MoE. Don't even think about 4 Plus. It's a nightmare. Kimi K is dear to my heart, though. You can't go wrong with it. I use it alongside Codex to complement my workflow. Really great. It scored 91.6 on SWE.
Those are just some of the options.
If you're a programmer, you probably don't need any of that. You just want to use Claude Code. Or get Cursor. Make sure to remove Grok from the auto-selection options. You don't want Grok. If you don't know why, then you don't need to know why.
Anyway, I use Jules with Antigravity now. In VS Code, I use Continue with a local R1 Flash running on Ollama. I use Qwen3.5-397B-A17B for setting up machines, and Qwen-VL to read through my camera feeds. The latter is particularly good at detecting forklifts.
And that's pretty much it. A fairly simple setup, really.
For the layperson, though, it's much easier: they just use the free ChatGPT tier and call it a day... Or Argon. It depends really. Google 3.6 Flash has the lowest score, but it is great for email. I mean how mean do you need your email game to be? Anyway, that's it.
Nano Banana! You probably need that too. It's great with Omni or Carbon.
That's it!