Any conversation

I’ve found the same, albeit with Opus — it’s hard to find uses for Fable. I don’t need a model that works for longer or works on harder problems, I need one that consistently produces simple, easy to understand, code; which at this point none of them do.

I've been there since I settled on a combination of GLM, DeepSeek and MiMo for planning, implementation, and verification flows. I'm a lot more interested at this point in having cheaper models that can consistently do the work I need. It's been a while that I hanven't noticed any improvement when I try new frontier models. I only notice they are very expensive.

good videogame music is often my coding sweet spot--no lyrics, something familiar

Occasionally silence if I forget to turn on music. Otherwise, death grips and a curated EDM playlist are on rotate. It keeps me moving fast. But also Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians albums go hard for long session, distraction-free music

Often silence, for me. I could create a (narrow) bell curve of problems where I listen to music. If I'm doing light enough work then I don't tend to listen to music, probably just out of habit - but as I approach problems of a certain complexity then I do prefer music. I just find that complexity band is narrow and past it I need to turn off the music. I would like to widen my music band. My preference is usually ambient - I like Gaussian curve and Hiroshi Yoshimura