Best LLM API for Coding Assistants 2026 — Hybrid vs All-Flagship

Why coding assistants eat your API budget alive I've watched de teams burn through \$30,000+ monthly API bills without blinking. Here's why: coding assistants are trigger-happy by design. The average developer fires 300-500 completion requests daily - that's one every 60-90 seconds during active coding. Most completions are brain-dead simple: closing brackets, variable names, standard library imports. But sprinkled throughout are genuinely hard problems: multi-file refactoring, debugging race conditions, architecting new features.