How I view LLMs as Sept 2026
I’ve spent over $30k in tokens since the start of the year across Codex, Claude, and GLM. Here’s how I view LLMs as of September 2026. Two categories: Instructions-following models: Like Luna and Sonnet. I used to call these “dumb”. But that’s the wrong way to think about them. They just cannot make good “common sense” decisions. They’re workhorses for pennies. Luna especially, is hard to spend a lot on. If you make the core decisions up front, coding is auto-complete. Intent-understanding models: Frontiers like Astra and Fable. These are higher “common sense” models. These models (try to) understand the intent behind the question. Solving problems is about making the right tradeoff - these models tend to make the right tradeoff more often than the other models. These models know how to orchestrate instruction-following models prescriptively - in a way humans get too lazy to. In my experience, today’s models are far from making the right human-like trade-offs. However, this is where I ...