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Gemini 4 Argon costs half of Claude Opus 5.5 per token. On my 20-run production monorepo bench it passed every test in 16 runs and never broke a passing test, the best result of any model so far. It also wrote 2.8x the output tokens and cost more than Opus. On December 1 the price doubles. On vision tasks it came last.
READBoris Cherny, who built Claude Code, says engineering, product, design and data science are melting into one role, and what's left is five archetypes: Prototyper, Builder, Sweeper, Grower, Maintainer. I read the list and realised I'm all five, because building solo with agents leaves no one to hand a phase to. The framework is thirty years old. What's new is that it just became the primary axis instead of the secondary one.
READBenchmarks say turn effort up. On real work, it went the other way. I ran Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol at low, medium, high, xhigh and max effort on six real changes from a production monorepo: 300 runs. Opus peaked at medium, the Claude Code default, and reproduced it exactly on a second day. Above medium it started breaking tests. More effort never made any model more careful.
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