Pick The Right Brain, Pay The Right Price

Part of the Vibe Coding: Advanced Engineering course

Model selection is an engineering decision with the same shape as choosing a database or a queue: there is no best option, only a fit for a workload. Reaching for the largest model on every request is the equivalent of running every job on the biggest instance type. It works, it hides your inefficiency, and it costs you somewhere else. This lesson gives you a way to decide.

Every specific number in this space expires. Model names change, prices drop, context limits grow, and a lesson that hardcoded a price per million tokens would be wrong within a quarter. So this lesson deliberately teaches the decision procedure and not the price list. ...