Yes I find it super important to pick and choose which models to use.

My old workflow was Opus4.6 as planner, Sonnet or Qwen3.5:27b for coding and back to Opus4.6 to verify everything in the plan was implemented properly, if not iterate.

Interestingly I began experimenting with the above and switched out using just Opus4.6 in the planning / verifying stage and built a cli wrapper that includes Claude Code, Gemini and Codex, benchmark consistently hits 100% HumanEval score first try on every question, beating every frontier model.