Just to be clear: I mean Copilot CLI. I had used the IDE, and it was terrible; I tried the CLI, and for some reason it was much better. I explain carefully what I want, and it iterates until it's done, quickly, on cheap models.
If you check the docs, smaller, faster, older models are recommended for 'lightweight' coding. There's several reasons for this. 1) a smaller model doesn't have as good deep reasoning, so it works okay for a simple ask. 2) small context, small task, small model can produce better results than big context, big task, big model. The lost-in-the-middle problem is still unsolved, leading to mistakes that get worse with big context, and longer runs exacerbate issues. So small context/task that ends and starts a new loop (with planning & learning) ends up working really well and quickly.
There's a difference between tasks and problem-solving, though. For difficult problems, you want a frontier reasoning model.
If you check the docs, smaller, faster, older models are recommended for 'lightweight' coding. There's several reasons for this. 1) a smaller model doesn't have as good deep reasoning, so it works okay for a simple ask. 2) small context, small task, small model can produce better results than big context, big task, big model. The lost-in-the-middle problem is still unsolved, leading to mistakes that get worse with big context, and longer runs exacerbate issues. So small context/task that ends and starts a new loop (with planning & learning) ends up working really well and quickly.
There's a difference between tasks and problem-solving, though. For difficult problems, you want a frontier reasoning model.