Then allow me to be judgemental in your stead. I've done a similar setup as the above and completely locally. I dunno how they're paying so much, but that's ridiculously overpriced.

All the other models performed much worse for the skills I'm using. I tried gpt-5.1 (and then 5.4 again recently), and also tried pointing it at OpenRouter and using a few of the cheaper models, and all of them added too much friction for me.

Be judgemental all you want, but I feel like I'm paying for less friction, and also more security since my experiments also showed claude to be the least vulnerable to prompt injection attempts.

> models performed much worse for the skills I'm using

Hard to believe unless your are doing something much more complex than the things you listed