Choose the right model in Copilot Chat's model picker instead of leaving it on default for everything

Before sending this to Copilot Chat, decide which model in the model picker this task actually
needs — do not leave it on whatever was selected for the previous, possibly very different, task.

TASK
Decide whether to store saved searches as a new database table or as a JSON column on the existing user_preferences row, and justify the choice.

REASONING DEMAND
Genuine tradeoff reasoning — this is an architectural decision with real long-term cost either way, not a mechanical task.

MODELS AVAILABLE IN THIS WORKSPACE'S PICKER
Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.2, and Gemini 3 Pro are all enabled in this workspace's picker.

LATENCY OR COST CONSTRAINT
None for this task — it runs once, so a slower, stronger model is worth the extra wait.

PICK USING THIS RULE
If Genuine tradeoff reasoning — this is an architectural decision with real long-term cost either way, not a mechanical task. describes genuine tradeoff reasoning — comparing two real architectural
approaches, tracing a subtle bug across several files, reviewing a security-sensitive change —
select the strongest reasoning-oriented model Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.2, and Gemini 3 Pro are all enabled in this workspace's picker. offers, even if it is slower,
because the cost of a wrong architectural call caught late is categorically higher than the extra
seconds a stronger model takes to answer. If the task is mechanical — a rename across files
matching an exact pattern, formatting a list into a table, generating a boilerplate test file from
an existing template — a faster, cheaper model in the picker will produce an equivalent result with
less latency, and running it on the strongest available model for that kind of task spends budget
the task did not need spent.

BEFORE SWITCHING MODELS MID-CONVERSATION
State explicitly that the model is changing and why, in the same message where you switch — a
different model does not share the exact reasoning trace of the model that answered the previous
turn, only the visible conversation text, so a silent mid-conversation switch can produce an answer
that looks like it continues the previous reasoning but was actually regenerated from scratch by a
different model reading only the transcript, not the reasoning that produced it.

If the strongest model is rate-limited, fall back to the second-strongest reasoning model rather than the fastest one, and say explicitly that a fallback happened.

CONSTRAINTS
- Do not assume every model in Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.2, and Gemini 3 Pro are all enabled in this workspace's picker. handles the same prompt structure equally well
  — a reasoning-oriented model generally tolerates an underspecified, exploratory question better
  than a faster completion-oriented model, which tends to need the task, constraints, and output
  format spelled out explicitly to produce a comparably good answer; adjust how much structure you
  give the prompt to the model actually selected, not a generic phrasing meant to work identically
  on all of them.
- If None for this task — it runs once, so a slower, stronger model is worth the extra wait. rules out the model Genuine tradeoff reasoning — this is an architectural decision with real long-term cost either way, not a mechanical task. would otherwise call
  for, say so explicitly rather than silently using a weaker model and treating its answer with the
  same confidence you would give the stronger one — a constrained choice should come with a
  correspondingly more skeptical read of the output, not the same trust level.