Agent workflow guide
Best AI Models for Agents
Agentic work is not just "best benchmark wins." You need strong tool use, long-context memory, reliability, and sane cost under repeated calls.
GPT-5.5
Best for: Complex reasoning
Tool use: 9.7 • Reasoning: 9.8 • Context: 1M
Prior OpenAI flagship. Strong coding and reasoning.
Claude Opus 4.8
Best for: Complex reasoning
Tool use: 9.6 • Reasoning: 9.8 • Context: 1M
Established option for complex agentic coding. Adaptive thinking.
GPT-5.4
Best for: Coding
Tool use: 9.7 • Reasoning: 9.5 • Context: 1M
Strong coding performance. Excellent tool integration.
Gemini 3.8 Flash
Best for: Long-horizon software engineering
Tool use: 9.7 • Reasoning: 9.6 • Context: 1.05M
Generally available Gemini Flash model. 1,048,576-token input and 65,536-token output limits.
Grok 4.5
Best for: Agentic coding
Tool use: 9.6 • Reasoning: 9.7 • Context: 500K
xAI frontier model for code and agentic tool calling. Configurable reasoning effort.
GPT-OSS-120B
Best for: Self-hosted
Tool use: 9 • Reasoning: 9.2 • Context: 128K
Open weights from OpenAI. Runs on single 80GB GPU.
Fast picks
- GPT-5.5 for highest-end planning and hard multi-step work
- Claude Opus 4.8 for autonomous coding, review, and professional work where reliability matters most
- GPT-5.4 for strong operator-style tool use at lower cost
- Gemini 3.8 Flash for long-horizon multimodal agents with search grounding and tool support
- Grok 4.5 for web/X-aware agents with a 500K-token context window
- GPT-OSS-120B for private self-hosted agent systems