I have. And the people who say "use a frontier" model are full of it. The frontier models aren't any better than the free ones.

What are you defining as free versus frontier, and for what purpose? For coding there is a big difference between Opus and GPT 5.3/4 versus Sonnet and other models such as open weight ones.

They note in another comment they don't even use search engines so I don't think they're the right person to ask regarding frontier models.

I'd ask them what tools they do use, but I doubt they'll see my comment; I'll see if I can mail it to them.

(Why wouldn't I see your comment?)

I just don't use the web much anymore because the experience has degraded so much over the past several years and it has become decreasingly useful at work as well. I do sometimes need to search for a document and find Kagi pretty good for that, but the old way of using a search engine to kind of explore and discover stuff just isn't viable anymore, unfortunately.

I administer software for a living so I read a lot of documentation of that software but it comes with the software so I don't ever really need to search for it; I also read and participate in some forums and us the relevant IRC channels.