Google released Gemini 3.6 Flash and independent testing found exactly zero intelligence improvement over 3.5 Flash. It is basically 3.5 Flash after an inference-cost consultant optimized the serving stack.

Two independent evaluations point toward the same broad conclusion:

• Abacus: slightly lower overall, with a notable agentic-coding regression.
• Artificial Analysis: exactly equal overall intelligence, with mixed category movement.
• Google: better efficiency and selected coding/agent benchmarks.

Analysis

I find the gpt 5.6 models don't use my entire usage doing simple tasks unlike some other ones

I don't understand why google is so slow. They didn't even release the 3.5 pro and gave us 3.6 flash instead. Even Luna is better than this.

Claude Opus 4.8 now represents 40% of Anthropic token consumption on OpenRouter and 45% of the dollar spend.

Source: openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/

OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol represents 15% of OpenAI's tokens but already represents 34% of its estimated spend on OpenRouter.

I've had the 20x subscription for both in the past. I want to get the $100 plan for one and the $20 plan for the other. I'm a CS student and intern who uses AI for education, programming/vibecoding, and office work, primarily through the desktop app.

My primary question is about weekly limits, not hourly ones. I've heard a rumor that Claude's weekly limit is identical between the 5x and 20x plans, with only the hourly limit differing, but I'm skeptical (if true, is it the same in ChatGPT?).

On the OpenAI side, consider that their models tend to be more token-efficient, stretching the same quota further. However, following the reset wave, usage seems to drain faster. For reference, a single Sol prompt on Plus consumed my weekly limit.

Secondary considerations:

• Model quality — comparable with OpenAI having a slight edge for me
• Harness differences — I find Claude Code better at sub-agent delegation, while Codex better for office work

Please exclude hourly limits, resets, other providers, and other plan configurations from the dilemma. I'm only asking which one will I be able to get more (and higher quality) weekly work done?

TL;DR: One $100 subscription and another $20 plan. Which $100 plan gives more actual weekly throughput for heavy dev/education use?

Better Backgrounds explores how far we can elevate webcam backgrounds using the latest 3D reconstruction, live matting, and compositing techniques.

Built for the OpenAI Build Week Hackathon in collaboration with Codex.

Repo: https://github.com/cjami/better-backgrounds

Adoption curve of Kimi K3 on OpenRouter is very similar to

Deepseek v4 Flash and GLM 5.2 with the same number of days after launch.

They call it cheating. I call it thinking out of the box. Adapt and overcome. Thoughts?