Ask HN: What LLM models are you using and why?

Hello, HN!

I'm wondering what y'all are using for your daily driver these days and why?

I've found myself using GPT-5.5 more than Opus 4.7 for work; which, has been a pretty big reversal. Previously, I was using Opus 4.6 for everything, and GPT-5.4 was only ever in the picture to provide a second opinion (with Grok a distant 3rd only when I wanted to throw some "chaos" into the mix). The reason I've personally pivoted, is I've found GPT-5.5 to be a bit more consistent, predictable, and tends to write in a way I find less tiresome (even if the code isn't quite as good as Opus 4.7).

For personal projects, I've started experimenting with DeepSeek V4 and have been pretty blown away by it because of it's cost to quality and I've found the 1M token window to be incredibly helpful for long-running tasks. Though I may also have an over abundance of fear of compaction during tasks. DeepSeek isn't quite as good at one-shotting things as either GPT-5.5 or Opus-4.7, but with sufficient linter/static-analysis guardrails I've found it's really hard to complain or find faults (especially at the price).

Finally, if you're also making use of reranking and/or embedding models, or anything else, to augment or perform specific tasks please share those too!