Its not just about saving $0.05. There are many legitimate reasons to not want the AI to do the thinking (aka architecting or planning) for you. In those cases where one-shotting is undesirable or unnecessary, closed frontier AIaaS has no advantages over open weights.

Yes? The difference is often 10X or 100X with very little time lost. I’m learning how to give it enough info pretty quickly.

Edit: I also have to read the methods anyway for scientific accountability/integrity anyways, so I may as well play that role at the outset.

Well its def not $0.05, I just started using claude sonnet 5 and Ive found most simple questions might be 0.05 cents, a unit test is something like 0.10 -> 0.20 and small features and classes get into the individual dollars. Sure its a lot faster but at the end of the day its not cheap.

Plus there is something to say about being in the drivers seat, youll have a much better idea of how it works instead of needing to talk to claude and hope its correct. Since most LLMs also not very good at ideas even in my experience with better models its better to think for 10mins, youll get a much high quality result

Yes, they can’t magically resolve ambiguities in the prompt. Hence it is better to make something clear at the outset