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Some opinionated advice on which model to pick for common use cases.

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Speed vs quality vs price

Fastest & cheapest:   gemini-2-5-flash, gpt-4o-mini, deepseek-v3, qwen-flash
Best quality/price:   gemini-2-5-pro, claude-sonnet-4-6, gpt-4o, qwen3-5-plus
Flagship (most $):    gpt-5.5, gpt-5.4, claude-opus-4.7, gemini-2-5-pro
Reasoning:            claude-opus-4.7, o3, qwq-plus, deepseek-reasoner

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Long context

Need >100k tokens? Sort by maxContextTokens:
  • qwen-long — 10M tokens
  • grok-4.20 — 2M tokens
  • gemini-2-5-pro / flash — 1M tokens
  • claude-opus-4.7 / 4.6 / sonnet-4.6 — 1M tokens
  • qwen3-5-plus / flash — 1M tokens
  • gpt-5.5 — 272K tokens
  • gpt-5.4 / 5.2 — 200K tokens
  • gpt-4o — 128K tokens

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Vision

For images in prompts:
  • General-purpose: gpt-4o (best accuracy on OCR + natural images)
  • Huge context (many images): gemini-2-5-pro
  • Document-heavy (PDF + text): claude-opus-4.7 or qwen3-max

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Coding

  • claude-opus-4.7 — step-change improvement in agentic coding over 4.6
  • claude-sonnet-4.6 — fast, great at code review and refactor
  • gpt-5.5 / 5.4 — strong on general programming
  • deepseek-v3 / qwen3-coder-plus — budget options for mass code gen

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Tool calling

All major flagships (gpt-5.5, gpt-5.4, claude-opus-4.7, gemini-2.5-pro, grok-4.20, qwen3-max, deepseek-v3) support tools. For best-reliability production agents, pick one and stick to it — don’t round-robin.

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JSON mode / Structured Outputs

  • gpt-5.5 / 5.4 / o3 — best at strict JSON schema
  • gemini-2-5-pro — excellent
  • claude-opus-4.7 — good; returns strict JSON when requested

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Cost-sensitive

Per million tokens (input/output, roughly):
  • qwen-flash — 0.05/0.05 / 0.4
  • gemini-2-5-flash — 0.075/0.075 / 0.3
  • deepseek-v3 — 0.14/0.14 / 0.28
  • gpt-4o-mini — 0.15/0.15 / 0.6
Check live pricing via GET /v1/models.

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Fallback pairs

Safe production pairs (primary → fallback):
  • gpt-5.5 → claude-opus-4.7 (cross-provider top-tier)
  • gpt-5.5 → gpt-5.4 (within OpenAI, cheaper)
  • gpt-5.4 → gpt-5.4-mini
  • claude-opus-4.7 → gpt-5.5 (cross-provider top-tier)
  • claude-opus-4.7 → claude-sonnet-4.6
  • gemini-2-5-pro → gemini-2-5-flash
  • gpt-5.4 → gemini-2-5-flash (cross-provider safety)
Configure in Settings → Fallbacks. See Fallback chains.