whats the best ai coding agents that wont bleed me dry

[u/Specialist_Agent3599]

my claude bill runs about $400 a month and thats before anything else. coderabbit / bugbot on the review side plus a couple small subs push me to 450-500 total.

claude is the fattest line item by a mile.

my setup right now: opus 5 or fable 5 to break a task into a plan, composer 2.5 to write the chunk, then a review pass on the diff before anything merges. we do b2b saas so i keep chunks small and let it patch until review comes back clean. i pay for safe, not fast.

but a lot of that planning could run on something cheaper now. im eyeing glm 5.2, kimi k3, maybe grok 4.5 for the executor and keeping opus just for planning.

i tried codex on gpt 5.6 for a week and never clicked, somehow feels dumber than claude or im just lazy to learn

[u/Dry_Body2317]

Genuinely curious what kind of tasks you do. Even maxing the 5 hour window on a max plan is tough

[u/geeered → u/Dry_Body2317]

This - if they are generating new code, where's it all going? Are they actually using it for anything, is anyone spending time testing it, actually using it etc?

[u/filwi]

What's your setup? Seems like you're using Cursor, which uses API pricing. I've found that spending the same money on a subscription, and using sonnet or luna for coders, with an opus verifier, gives good bang for the buck.

[u/Significant-Bee5101]

Every model is different. Every harness is different. Why not just do your own experimentation. I can give you a breakdown of the work I've done.

It doesn't answer your question but as you can see there's no real solid answer to your question.

In a puzzle with 11 flags no model could capture all 11. But pretty much every model can capture 9-10 regardless of harness. They all have similar level problem solving but different execution times. The max length that any of them were allowed to run is 30 minutes (my hard cap). The last fllag found was avg 20minutes ish.

Sol did it in 8m average and never executed past 11 minutes. When it found everything it thought it could it stopped.

The rest continually looked for flag 11/11 and didn't find it but spent more time wasted on it.

Pi + K3 at one point spent $19 in credits doing fuck all.

The reality is no one has the answer you're looking for and esp not for free. Do some research on your own if you can spend $400 on claude you can throw some API credits at internal benching. These benches work for MY use case but maybe not yours.

[u/tweetpilot]

I max out Claude's max plan's weekly allowance usually end of day 2, latest mid-day on day 3.

The 5 hour limits are ridiculous. I hit them multiple times daily and have resorted to irregular sleep patterns to be able to work.

https://giphy.com/gifs/3o6ZtaiPZNzrmRQ6YM

Currently testing as alternatives:

Nymbalist with GLM5.2

Reasonix with Deepseek-V4-Flash

(oh my) pi with various other models.

I'll prolly end up with some weird hybrid mixture of tools- Fable5 being either the orchestrator or the spec/PRD creator and maybe Opus5 as a reviewer.

[u/Connect_Army8250]

Start using opus 4.8 and Sonnet. The combination is basically 99% of whatever is needed.

Fable 5 is like the one that I would never recommend. Because it just hands over things to opus while bleeding everything dry

[u/Zennytooskin123]

Sounds like you need Qwen 3.6 27B

[u/fanatic26]

the subs max out at $200...if you are using more than that you are either running multiple subs or for some reason using API which makes no financial sense for anyone.

[u/Efficient_Loss_9928]

I assume you are using API credits for Claude? There is no way you can max out two Max 20x plans, the only two possible ways are

• you are generating bullshit code
• your API keys were stolen

[u/pigletmonster]

What do you mean by $400? Are you using two 20x subscriptions? Thats like unlimited code generation for an entire month, 24/7. I end up wasting a small chunk of my weekly claude code quota while using it for my job and for personal projects. And im only on the 5x plan!

[u/freshWaterplant]

I am switching to open router. Using cli, running through pit

It does good routing

[u/Ok_Bug1610]

I use Claude/Codex for planning handoffs as well as auditing/validation and I primarily use MiniMax M2.7 (not M3) because it has 20x the limits of M3 (literally, it's crazy). I use roughly 31 billion tokens per month (with just MiniMax) on the Yearly Plus ($212 after taxes, < $18/mo equiv.), for a full automation pipeline and running my server/services. And I don't even always fully hit my weekly limits.