[selcuka]

> Most of the time, Haiku is fine.

Haiku is most definitely not fine for the code bases that I work on. Sonnet is probably fine for most daily tasks, but Opus is still needed to find that pesky bug you've been chasing, or to thoroughly review your PR.

[timr]

> Haiku is most definitely not fine for the code bases that I work on. Sonnet is probably fine for most daily tasks, but Opus is still needed to find that pesky bug you've been chasing, or to thoroughly review your PR.

Yeah, I hear that a lot, but it never comes with proof. Everyone is special.

I’m sure you’d find that Haiku is pretty functional if there were a constraint on your use.

[Aurornis]

I use models from Opus through Haiku and down into Qwen locally hosted models.

I don't know how anyone could believe that Haiku is useful for most engineering tasks. I often try to have it take on small tasks in the codebase with well defined boundaries to try to conserve my plan limits, but half the time I end up disappointed and feeling like I wasted more time than I should have.

The differences between the models is vast. I'm not even sure how you could conclude that Haiku is usable for most work, unless you have a very different type of workload than what I work on.

[timr]

More information required. What are you working on? What languages? How do you define “small tasks”? What are “well-defined boundaries”? What is your workflow?

Most importantly, define your acceptance criteria. What do you mean by “disappointed” - this word is doing most of the heavy lifting in your anecdote. (i.e. I know plenty of coders who are “disappointed” by any code that they didn’t personally write, and become reflexively snobby about LLM code quality. Not saying that’s you, but I can’t rule it out, either.)

The models are not the same, but Haiku is definitely not useless, and without a lot more detail, I just ignore anecdotal statements with this sort of hyperbole. Just to illustrate the larger point, I find something wrong with nearly everything Haiku writes, but then again, I don’t expect perfection. I’d probably get a “better” end result for most individual runs with the more expensive models, but at vastly higher cost that doesn’t justify the difference.

[krzyk]

I use Haiku frequently, and for my codebase it is working fine.

But I'm not vibecoding, I don't let models do large work or refactorings, this is just for some small boring tasks I don't want to do.

[zdragnar]

I don't think it's really helpful to tell people they're holding it wrong, especially when you hear the problem a lot.

Maybe, just maybe, the tool isn't suitable for all problem spaces.

[timr]

> I don't think it's really helpful to tell people they're holding it wrong

I’m not saying that. If anything, it really doesn’t matter much what model you use, and it’s only a case of “you’re holding it wrong” in the sense that you have to use your brain to write code, and that if you outsource your thinking to a machine, that’s the fundamental mistake.

In other words, it’s a tool, not a magic wand. So yeah, you do have to understand how to use it, but in a fairly deterministic way, not in a mysterious woo-woo way.

[macintux]

“Everyone is special” is a snarky, derogatory comment we don’t need here.

[timr]

It’s not snarky. It’s literally the argument people are making: I am special, my use case is exceptional, therefore I need to use the special tool, even if you don’t need to.

[qingcharles]

Also, GitHub Copilot dropped down to defaulting to GPT5.3 for most requests after culling Opus, and honestly, that was a SOTA model only weeks ago. It blew people's minds about how good it was. And now we're all here moaning. It's even worse than your Ferrari->Bicycle example. It's like they took away your 2026 Ferrari and gave "just" a 2025 Ferrari.

[enraged_camel]

>> Yeah, I hear that a lot, but it never comes with proof. Everyone is special.

You were the one who made the claim that Haiku is fine most of the time. To any reasonable person, the burden of proof is on you. Maybe you should share some high level details about your codebase, like its stack, size, problem domain, and so on? Maybe they are so generic that Haiku indeed does fine for you.

[demorro]

Most of the people using these models aren't skilled enough to make that determination. Seems rough trying to sell yourself as the thing that means you don't need to understand what you're doing but also insist that you understand what you're doing well enough to select an appropriate model.

[ncruces]

I think Haiku is fine (e.g.) for any task that you could almost, but not quite, complete with (regex?) find and replace.

You give it 3 examples of the change you want, then ask it to do the other 87. You'll end up saving time and “money”.