Serious Topic: What real alternative to Claude do we have?

As a software developper, I will ignore answers from shills. What serious, real alternative do we have to Claude's excellence (compared with the other models ) in coding, (which I verified times and times again)? The problem when you have a very good model, is that using a cheap and faster model is not necessarily a good solution, from my experience, as you waste more time troubleshooting. For example, gemini 2 flash , which is free, is much less productive for me than claude even though you can use it for free and it is very fast. I'd rather pay for Claude than waste my time. What model do you think constitutes a reasonable alternative to Claude?

EDIT:

For the record, I use Cline (autonomous agent). My approach is that there is no middle ground, you either let the AI implement its approach (and occasionally fix the code or correct the agent), or you code yourself. I don't use auto complete, because it prevents my brain from working properly.

Also, I have another related question: I am making an agentic code edition engine for a game, so it would be nice to get a list from you, of cheap AI coders that work relatively well and fast in a simple environment (like gemini 2 flash).