I prefer GPT 5.5 to Opus but both are absurdly expensive token hogs, I can't afford to use either as my main model at $work with the monthly spend cap we have.

I use Composer (since we use Cursor) or GPT 5.3-codex as my workhorse models and only break out the big guns when I have a genuinely difficult problem to solve.

IMO somewhat weirdly 5.3-codex might be the best overall coding model OpenAI have ever released. It's 90% as good as 5.5 and costs about 20% as much, since it's both cheaper per token and uses fewer tokens for the same task.

I'll miss it when they inevitably deprecate it, but hopefully I can use Kimi K2.7 by then