The unreasonable effectiveness of an LLM agent loop with tool use

I've found sonnet-3.7 to be incredibly inconsistent. It can do very well but has a strong tendency to get off-track and run off and do weird things.

3.5 is better for this, ime. I hooked claude desktop up to an MCP server to fake claude-code less the extortionate pricing and it works decently. I've been trying to apply it for rust work; it's not great yet (still doesn't really seem to "understand" rust's concepts) but can do some stuff if you make it `cargo check` after each change and stop it if it doesn't.

I expect something like o3-high is the best out there (aider leaderboards support this) either alone or in combination with 4.1, but tbh that's out of my price range. And frankly, I can't mentally get past paying a very high price for an LLM response that may or may not be useful; it leaves me incredibly resentful as a customer that your model can fail the task, requiring multiple "re-rolls", and you're passing that marginal cost to me.

I've been using Mistral Medium 3 last couple of days, and I'm honestly surprised at how good it is. Highly recommend giving it a try if you haven't, especially if you are trying to reduce costs. I've basically switched from Claude to Mistral and honestly prefer it even if costs were equal.

How are you running the model? Mistral’s api or some local version through ollama, or something else?

Is mistral on open router?