I just spent $35 for Opus to solve a problem with a hardware side-project (I'm turning an old rotary phone into a meeting handset so I can quit meetings by hanging up, if you must know). It didn't solve the problem, it churned and churned and spent a ton of money.
I was much more satisfied with o3 and Aider, I haven't tried them on this specific problem but I did quite a bit of work on the same project with them last night. I think I'm being a bit unfair, because what Claude got stuck on seems to be a hard problem, but I don't like how they'll happily consume all my money trying the same things over and over, and never say "yeah I give up".
When I obtain results from one paid model that are significantly better than what I previously got from another paid model, I'll typically give a thumbs-down to the latter and point out in the comment that it was beaten by a competitor. Can't hurt.
I was much more satisfied with o3 and Aider, I haven't tried them on this specific problem but I did quite a bit of work on the same project with them last night. I think I'm being a bit unfair, because what Claude got stuck on seems to be a hard problem, but I don't like how they'll happily consume all my money trying the same things over and over, and never say "yeah I give up".