Reviews

Claude Fable 5 is the best model I have put on real work this year. It is also expensive enough to make you flinch, and it spent the second half of June switched off by a government order. All three of those things are true at once, which is the only honest way to review it.

Coding assistant comparisons usually happen on toy problems with clean answers, which is exactly why they are useless. So I did the opposite. I took one genuinely annoying real bug, the kind that spans a few files and does not announce itself, and pointed three assistants at it: Claude, GPT, and Microsoft new MAI coding model in Copilot. Here is how they actually did.

People want one answer to "which AI is best," and there is not one. There is a best model for coding, a best for long documents, a best for cheap bulk work, and a best for running on your own hardware, and they are rarely the same model. Here is how I actually pick, in mid-2026, after using all four families on real work.

There is a specific moment where Gemini 3.1 Pro stops being one option and becomes the obvious one: the moment you drop a 400-page document or a video into the chat and ask it to make sense of the whole thing. For that job, nothing in my rotation touches it.

Gemma 4 12B is not going to top any leaderboard, and reviewing it against the frontier would miss the point entirely. The question that matters is different: how much useful AI can you now run entirely on your own laptop, with the internet unplugged? The answer, it turns out, is a surprising amount.

Reviewing GPT-5.6 is a bit like reviewing a reliable mid-size sedan. There is not much drama here, and that is sort of the point. It does almost everything competently, nothing spectacularly, and it will not embarrass you. For a huge number of people, that is exactly the right model.

Grok Imagine Video 1.5 is the kind of tool that looks incredible for the first ten seconds and complicated after the first hour. It generates video with native audio, roughly twice as fast as the last version, and it will happily produce something jaw-dropping right before it produces something faintly cursed.

Kimi K2 belongs to my favorite category of model: the one that makes you recheck the pricing page because the numbers look like a typo. Near-frontier reasoning, notably cheaper than the big names, and it gets to the answer using fewer tokens than its predecessor. Mostly, it holds up. Mostly.

Llama 4 Scout is easy to review badly. You quote the ten-million-token context window, call it revolutionary, and move on. Having actually run it, the honest review is more interesting, and more useful: Scout is a very good open model whose best feature is not the one on the box.

Microsoft did something quietly significant: it dropped its own MAI-Code-1-Flash model into GitHub Copilot, the coding assistant a lot of us use every day. This is a review of how it actually feels to code with, not how it looks in a keynote, because those are very different things.

Everyone reviews the frontier. Almost nobody carefully reviews the budget shelf, which is a shame, because that is where most real work should actually run. I spent time putting the cheap models through the same ordinary tasks I use every day. The winner was not the one I expected, and the losers were instructive.