# OpenAI Luna

218 Hacker News commenters recommended OpenAI Luna and 56 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A very cheap OpenAI model that people say handles everyday and agentic tasks nearly as well as bigger models; critics say it struggles with complex reasoning and coding.

## Why people recommend it

- Extremely cheap, great value (14 comments): "Luna saw a huge jump after the price cut and is one of the more competitive models at the new price on openrouter." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339123)) "if the task is simple enough that they do come out cheaper than Sol, I can switch to Luna and come in even cheaper" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021801)) "there are many models like deepseek v4 flash and luna that are both cheaper and way better than most other models" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221496))
- Rivals larger, pricier models (7 comments): "In my real world use Luna is as useful to me as Sonnet. And it gets stuff done faster and follows my instructions more closely." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114901)) "I use Luna a lot (over 1T tokens since it came out) and I'd rank Luna (high/xhigh) on par with Sonnet 5, without hesitation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113810)) "Luna is so extremely cheap and cranked up to max it does anything I'd want Terra to do for a fraction of the cost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277982))
- Good daily driver for simple tasks (7 comments): "For lightweight/daily driver tasks, Gemini Flash 3.8, DeepSeek Flash, and Luna are still up there as favorites." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50218402)) "Having a great time with Luna lately, even on Low reasoning effort, which I wasn't expecting at all." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315979)) "is ridiculously cheap @ $0.2/$1.2, easily accessible, and more than good enough for basic use cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467875))
- Reliable tool calls, follows instructions (4 comments): "Luna is the most impressive model released so far by any provider. It's perfect for doing all the low-level tool calling and developing hypotheses." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047230)) "I've been driving Luna xhigh in CoPilot CLI since it was released as my daily driver. Good reasoning, no problems with tool calls." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49116540)) "In my real world use Luna is as useful to me as Sonnet. And it gets stuff done faster and follows my instructions more closely." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114901))

## What people warn about

- Weak at complex reasoning, coding (6 comments): "Luna and in general, smaller models, will struggle to understand the intent and complexities behind human language." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073427)) "Sol was a lot happier with what Terra produced and would find far fewer issues than what was implemented by Luna." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49808817)) "It's also pretty cheap if you're paying for it (for coding). But I don't quite trust it for anything complicated" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201210))
- Slow, needs high reasoning effort (4 comments): "Luna is not really the fastest. You need to use it in high/max to get the good output for what it is good for: summarizing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49999042)) "they’re quite slow (OAI seems to be really slow lately) and don’t have the reasoning traces" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276485)) "Luna xhigh can achieve similar scores on the evals, but it takes noticeably longer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49472033))
- Takes shortcuts, writes messy code (3 comments): "I've had Luna take shortcuts (like adding an overload to methods whose signature it changed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391696)) "It imported the library and wrote spaghetti if-statement soup to get it to work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49813817)) "Luna is that but worse so if you account for things like going down wrong paths" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471791))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Haiku](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-haiku.md): 218 recommend
- [Apple Foundation Models](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apple-foundation-models.md): 45 recommend
- [Ministral](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ministral.md): 18 recommend
- [Microsoft Phi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/phi.md): 16 recommend
- [LFM2.5 2.6B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lfm2-5-2-6b.md): 14 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "OpenAI Luna", https://hackerapproved.com/p/luna/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).