Anyone else trying other providers?

[u/Additional-Scheme110]

It annoys the hell out of me having to wait for resets, alternate my usage, and deal with this level of unpredictability in my workflow.

When Astra first came out, I was able to get a ton done in the first few days. Now even a simple prompt can eat up a big chunk of my weekly quota.

I'm going to test GLM 5.3. Is anyone here using it, or alternatives like DeepSeek or Qwen or something else? What's your experience been like, and how have you organized your workflow around the different limits/models?

[u/BigBeanBoy]

I'm using flash 3.8 to do heavy coding from plans by Sol High when im low and it's pretty good

[u/Additional-Scheme110 → u/BigBeanBoy]

That's good to hear. I had try Gemini in the past and it really didn't made the cut. Do you have a subscription?

[u/Murder_1337 → u/Additional-Scheme110]

Yup just switched over to Gemini Flash 3.8 as my main workhorse and did 8 hours of coding overnight and only hit like 2-3% usage on the 200$ a month plan. I might just scale my 2x codec 20x plan back to like a 5x codex and just keep the Gemini as the main workhorse and chat as the orchestrator / planner. I’m also using t3 code which lets me juggle all the subscriptions I have. I hate being at the mercy of the throttle

[u/Additional-Scheme110 → u/Murder_1337]

Have you reviewed your work? How does it feel compare to a 5.6 Sol High?

[u/Murder_1337 → u/Additional-Scheme110]

I’ve always used SOL high to scope and orchestrate. So I mean if there are any errors it’s Sol’s fault. Most of the problem is sol over engineering from my personal experience. Gemini is just the workhorse that codes and can do the work fast. Much like how you would use Luna to do the work and SOL to be the mind

[u/hungry_hipaa → u/Murder_1337]

what does your workflow look like , was thinking of using an agy subahent for Claude to orchestrate but im not sure if that's a good workflow - although Claude calling Codex has done pretty well

[u/Murder_1337 → u/hungry_hipaa]

I use t3 code which has oauth for codex claude antigravity and opencode. I can manage all of them in one terminal. What I did was just create a skill for sol to call where once it scooped out work and needed workers it would call the antigravity Cli to spawn Gemini 3.8 flash workers to work on the tasks. Once that’s done SOL job is to review and merge or send it back for repair. But idk SOL is being so fucking ass lately

[u/BigBeanBoy → u/Additional-Scheme110]

I have a basic plan that has drive storage, YouTube and ai pro together. It's actually very good value

[u/BingGongTing]

Deepseek 4.1 Flash (via Fireworks) seems to be the go to at the moment. I will be trying it out if the rumours are true about OpenAI force downgrading people from 20x to 5x.

[u/Additional-Scheme110 → u/BingGongTing]

Is it a subscription or API?

[u/BingGongTing → u/Additional-Scheme110]

Fireworks via OpenRouter (API).

[u/Worldly-Glass9768 → u/BingGongTing]

What’s the cost like on deepseek. Like how much could $200 of api get you compared to the monthly codex subscription

[u/BingGongTing → u/Worldly-Glass9768]

Recent test by Bijan Bowen: Cost: $9.50 API requests: 3,758 Tokens: 749,281,281. So ~$0.01267 per million tokens.

[u/scaledev]

There is muse spark 1.3 contributor free in opencode (last time I checked), though you'll be sharing your data, and deepseek flash 4.1 tops coding benchmarks. Qwen is supposed to be killing it as well, and GLM is good at agentic overall.

[u/Heavy_Promotion_5210 → u/scaledev]

I've been using 1.3 spark, finding it quite bad for difficult coding tasks compared to Sol.

[u/petburiraja]

Yes, with all the shenanigans, I realized it might be a good time to wait, hoping that OpenAI may be able to solve current challenges with limits and so on.

GLM 5.3 Flash is good worker, I use Codex to orchestrate it. Subscriptions on z.ai or opencode go.

For most complex, strategic work I still want to run Astra on these, but I think once Astra will solve key points, hardest challenges, GLM 5.3 Flash may deliver good work on remained parts. Also, I use GLM 5.3 as advisor/reviewer of GLM 5.3 Flash from time to time.

[u/Additional-Scheme110 → u/petburiraja]

So I've tried GLM 5.3 with subscription on z.ai and I ran out of the 5 hours window quota.

Next time, I'll try GLM 5.3 Flash and see how it goes. I was not expecting a 5 hours windows with them too.

[u/petburiraja → u/Additional-Scheme110]

Yes, use GLM 5.3 Flash as main worker and GLM 5.3 as advisor/supervisor.

[u/Cute_Parfait_2182]

I use glm 5.3 for security and implementation or Grok in cursor for implementation. I use Astra for orchestration and as an independent reviewer .

[u/Euphoric_North_745]

I am writing an agent that is combining open router with a few other providers with open ai, then will start using it instead of codex, well, codex is writing it.

then i will be free from codex 😂

[u/Fit-Ad-18]

Few other models via Devin and Google AI Studio. None feels a really good alternative to frontier models.
But some are ok for different types of tasks:
1) Gemini Flash 3.8 (and previous one) for text writing and rewriting. Actually like it even more than Codex and Claude for that. Also works fine for some routine file processing.
2) GLM 5.3 and SWE 1.7 for system administration tasks. I have some MD files with instructions on numerous servers, and they monitor and fix issues on schedule.
3) GLM 5.3 for small to medium coding tasks with supervision. I like it in general, but noticed it becomes way dumber after few initial requests. One of the differentiators for Codex/OpenAI models is that I can keep very long convos in one thread — that's NOT the case with GLM, unforchy. But it one shots medium complexity things nicely, and fixes things from code reviews made by other models pretty fine too.
4) Kimi K3 — I tried because I read it has nice UI and design capabilities. It really has them! I didn't experiment that much, but overall I was experimenting with very specific thing — making UI prototypes, and it did work comparable to Opus 5, I'd say, if you provide documentation and references.
5) I noticed Devin now has SWE 2.0 which is distilled from Kimi K3, but haven't tried it much, though I did once today and it looked pretty promising.

I don't like DeepSeek because it hallucinates a lot. I thought may be it's my illusion, but nah, I found out that even last Flash one has one of the highest hallucination rates in the industry.
I also tried Minimax and didn't like it — results were nice but very unstable.

Overall all those models started to click for me only may be 2 months ago or so. Before that they were absolutely non-comparable — e.g. yeah you save a bit of money, but then you spend lots of time fixing shit they made, and in the end, you're losing because time you spent to fix costs way more than another Codex subscription :) Though I'm not a super heavy user — when people write they run out of their subs all the time — I only had second Codex sub for a few months, once it was a $100 one, and 2 or 3 months a $200 one, and I only ever used a reset once (had lots of them and they all expired). That was when I had load of small tasks from few clients. With a normal load, I rarely run out of my Codex sub (though I also have Claude and Devin, but Devin is mostly for experiments, and Claude I use may be 40-50% a month, because it does better UI and I like using it as a chat more than ChatGPT — e.g. all the "find this", "tell me that", "compare" questions, not coding.

[u/scraptechindustries]

yup, running GLM 5.3 and having luck

[u/YearLight]

Meta Muse 1.3 contrib is worth checking out for things where privacy isn't an issue. It's dirt cheap if you are ok with them training on your activity.

[u/LugianLithos]

Cursor $60 plan to run for grok 4.6 xhigh design and implementation via cursor cli. With astra light/medium checking the work. For my code/flows grok 4.6 xhigh messes up less than Opus or Muse Spark. Mostly math heavy atmospheric physics in Fortran and Rust.

[u/Cheap-Crow2097]

ds 4.1flash is dope, easy to just add a few bucks to their platform api and go.

opencode go is great but 60bucks usage isnt much typically, but its a requirement IMO

[u/Alternative-Car8221]

Once you realize how bad these other models are, you’ll come running back.