Kaushik Gopal

@kau.sh

1448 Followers 507 Following

🌐 https://kau.sh 👨‍💻 Principal Engineer @instacart + Caper 🛒 🎧 Fragmented podcast 🤖 Google Developer Expert

Public gist at https://gist.github.com/kaushikgopal/d92cd6a483c8b8683a2cd04137257866
A common question I get is, “Which AI model should I use for X task?” Models evolve so rapidly that I never felt like I could give an answer that would stay relevant for more than a month or two. This year, I finally feel like I have a stable set of model choices that consistently gives me good results. I’m jotting it down here to share more broadly, and to trace how my own choices evolve over time. GPT 5.2 (High) for planning and writing, including writing plans Opus 4.5 for anything coding, task automation, and tool calling Gemini’s range of models for everything else: Gemini 3 (Thinking) for learning and understanding concepts (underrated) - Gemini 3 (Flash) for my go-to quick-answer questions - Nano Banana (obv) for all image generation - NVIDIA’s Parakeet for voice transcription
Go with monthly AI subscriptions friends. I can’t remember where I read this tip, but given how fast the AI lab models move, it’s smarter to stick with a monthly plan instead of locking into an annual one, even if the annual price looks more attractive. I hit a DI issue on Android and was too lazy to debug it myself, so I pointed two models at it. GPT Codex gave me the cleanest, correct fix. Claude Sonnet 4.5 found a fix, but it wasn’t idiomatic and was pretty aggressive with the changes. A month ago, I wouldn’t have bothered with anything other than the Claude models for coding. Today, Codex clearly feels ahead. Google is about to ship its next Gemini model and, from what I’m hearing, it’s going to be absurdly good. In these wonderfully unstable times, monthly subscriptions are the way to go.
claude migrates my android app from compose navigation 2 to jetpack navigation 3
decommissioned TPU v4 that Google used from their 4th/5th gen AI accelerators
Introducing “shorts” for Henry (my Hugo blog engine/theme). Often, I find myself wanting to post a quick thought or note without the ceremony of a full-blown “blog post”. That’s usually when I’d post to Bluesky, X, Threads, or Mastodon. But as I’ve said before, I prefer investing in a feed I control. With Henry, I can effortlessly post a quick thought, and share it from a feed I own.
Chrome has removed uBlock Origin - only the most useful extension on the planet