How I Pick AI Coding Models — A 2026 Startup CTO Guide Three months ago our infra bill looked like a crime scene. We were burning $14k/month on a single coding assistant API, half of which came from one model none of my engineers even liked. That was the day I stopped trusting "best in class" blog posts and started benchmarking the models myself, on our actual workloads, with our actual money on the line. What follows is the playbook I built. Ten models, five real tasks, and a score-per-do...