For most coding work, Claude Opus 5 is the strongest all-round pick: it is built for agentic coding and can read a large codebase in one go. For the hardest problems in big codebases, Claude Fable 5.1 goes further. For code alone at a lower price, GPT-5.3 Codex is purpose-built.
Best overall
Built for agentic coding and complex reasoning, with room to read a whole service and its tests at once.
For the hardest problems
Anthropic’s most capable model, made for complex codebases and problems that need long, careful reasoning.
Built for code
OpenAI’s coding model, made for complex code generation and refactors that span many files.
Best free pick
Strong at coding with a very large context window, at Flash speed and a low price.
For quick reviews
xAI’s coding model for generation, review and refactoring, and the lowest-priced of these picks.
Prices are each provider’s list price.
| Model | Plan | Input price | Output price | Reads up to | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5 | Lite | $5 per 1M tokens | $25 per 1M tokens | 1M tokens | Powerful |
| Claude Fable 5.1 | Pro | $10 per 1M tokens | $50 per 1M tokens | 1M tokens | Powerful |
| GPT-5.3 Codex | Lite | $1.75 per 1M tokens | $14 per 1M tokens | 400K tokens | Powerful |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | Free | $0.75 per 1M tokens | $3.75 per 1M tokens | 1.0M tokens | Balanced |
| Grok Build | Free | $1 per 1M tokens | $2 per 1M tokens | 256K tokens | Balanced |
Three things separate a good coding model from a merely clever one. The first is how much code it can see at once. A model with a large context window can hold a whole service and its tests, so its changes fit the code around them instead of guessing at it.
The second is reasoning. Debugging is detective work, and models built for agentic coding plan a change across files before they write it, rather than patching the line the error points at.
The third is cost per attempt. Coding is a loop of try, test and fix, so a cheaper model you can run ten times often beats an expensive one you run once.
A fast, low-cost model such as Gemini 3.8 Flash is a good start, because you can ask why as often as you like. Ask it to explain each line, not just to write the code.
Yes. In Araveil you can switch models in the same conversation, for example GPT-5.3 Codex for a refactor and Claude Opus 5 to review it.