Grok 4.6 is my daily driver now. This is why:
When I’m using interactive agents in a CLI/terminal (or even Slack), what matters most to me is speed & token throughput. Intelligence and differences in performance on benchmarks is negligible to me when speed is sacrificed.
If I am there to steer & guide the agent, or make some quick fixes, then I don’t want to wait 5+ min per turn.
Opus 5 (fast) is a good solution to this, but it is WAY too expensive. Grok 4.6 is perfect though, incredibly fast, almost as smart as Fable, and relatively much cheaper than anything else right now.
On the flip side, for cloud agents working in Factories & background tasks triggered on crons, I don’t mind using intelligent, slow models like Fable / Sol. I’d even opt for a model router for cloud tasks that biases to heavy, smart models.
I guess the meta point I’m making here is that model choice is largely a function of whether there’s a human waiting in the loop.
