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A task-by-task guide to picking a coding model in 2026 — writing features, hunting bugs, refactoring, reviewing long diffs and writing docs — based on head-to-head tests we ran ourselves, not vendor benchmark slides. All the models here run on one $9.9/month AIWITH.CHAT plan.

A practical comparison of the models people actually pay for in 2026 — GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.1 Pro, DeepSeek V4.1 and Kimi K3 — organised by what you are trying to do, not by leaderboard position. All five run on one $9.9/month AIWITH.CHAT plan.

GPT-6 Astra tops the intelligence indexes and dominates agentic benchmarks — but every direct route to it costs money. Here are the two ways to actually run it for free first, and which one fits your situation.

OpenAI just launched Astra for Law, a legal-specific build of GPT-6 Astra with a case-law search index and 26 partner plugins. Here's what's actually in it, who can get it, and how to try the underlying model today.

Google's Gemini 3.8 Live costs about $1.38 per hour of conversation versus roughly $3.00 for OpenAI's GPT-Live-1, and its Extended Thinking variant tops the speech-to-speech leaderboard. It's an API voice model, not a chat model — here's who should care.

GPT-6 Astra costs five times what Gemini 3.1 Pro does per token and takes ten times longer to answer. On independent benchmarks it wins most of them — but not the ones you'd expect. Here's where each one is actually the right pick, and why most people shouldn't be choosing at all.

Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash are the two Chinese open-weight models most people actually consider in 2026 — and one costs about twenty times the other. Independent benchmarks say K3 is smarter, but not everywhere, and V4.1 Flash is six times faster. Here's where each one wins, and why the price gap matters less than you'd think if you're not paying per token.

Same $10/$50 API price, and the benchmarks disagree with each other. Here's what GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5 are each actually better at for coding — and why the honest answer for most developers isn't one of them.

You're paying $20/month for Claude Pro and it's good. The question isn't whether Claude is worth it — it's whether one lab's models should cost you twice what all of them cost together. Here's the honest comparison, including where Claude Pro still wins.

You want OpenAI's model for some things and Anthropic's for others — but $40/month for two subscriptions is hard to justify. Here are the four real ways to get both, with the honest cost and trade-off of each.

Three subscriptions, $59.99 a month, and a browser with three AI tabs permanently open. Here's what actually happened when I cancelled all of them — including the two things I genuinely miss.