Those groks are quite old by now, and not impressive.
Minimax M2.7 is a big upgrade vs 2.5, at a similar price, should easily beat the grok.
GLM 5.1 is also a great value (with coding plans), around claude sonnet capability.
But if you are doing a lot of coding your best value will be a coding plan, not pay per token. Gpt plus is a really good value and its 5.4-high model is super capable, some even consider it better than opus.
I don't think it's worth getting less than state of the art models to do actual coding, if the code will actually be used. Costs a bit more but will save you a lot of time in the end, and will produce a better quality product.
He'd have had a chance if not for the "$0 campaign" publicity stunt, and the hidden trail of money coming from very suspicious places. Who is supposed to believe that he invested nothing, and got top position in the first round, while having absolutely nothing to do with the "benefactors". That and it seems tik tok favoured him, beyond the advantage of comment spam. And none of the content was labeled with the campaign id according to the law.
If he spent at least a decent amount of money for the campaign, $100.000 or whatever, he'd have a better chance at plausibly denying the connection with the tik tok amplifier people, who in truth, could very well be just "fans", like Elon Musk was for Trump.
And there's also the Iron Guard connections all over the place, that pretty much make you incompatible with the function, same reason the other candidate got removed from the list.
So the decision isn't really undemocratic, although the moment it was given in was probably not quite legal/right, should have been done after the second round, but that would have caused more uproar and give him more legitimacy if he had won, and the odds are that he would have, so that's why they decided to cut it early, to minimise damage.
Pretty much all of the public system uses windows as OS, and most of the times it's just to use a browser to access a webapp. But there are actual windows lock-ins (due to people training and existing workflow/infrastructure that has no incentive to change), such as MS Office and Adobe Reader.
So there was no reason for Microsoft to bribe decision-making people to use windows, windows was already firmly locked in, they did it just so they can overprice licenses and for them to accept leased licenses instead of a permanent one time pay windows license. Big win for MS and bribe takers, big loss to common decency and public spending availability.
A sign of a healthy democratic government can be seen in the decisions to build future public software infrastructure on open source technology, and use Linux as client/server OS (as it's pretty much the only other alternative offering similar ease of use/maintenance/compatibility with existing software).
edit: wrote this to show it's not necessarily the cost of doing business, in most places, because the software ecosystem is already locked in and can't be replaced overnight and without considerable spending. It's just the cost of extracting more public money. And sometimes it's the cost to keep the business safe from decisions to steer towards Opensource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
But if you are doing a lot of coding your best value will be a coding plan, not pay per token. Gpt plus is a really good value and its 5.4-high model is super capable, some even consider it better than opus.
I don't think it's worth getting less than state of the art models to do actual coding, if the code will actually be used. Costs a bit more but will save you a lot of time in the end, and will produce a better quality product.