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Someone1234today at 3:15 PM3 repliesview on HN

> There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

For direct user interaction or coding problems, perhaps. But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets, or as sub-agents called from expensive SOTA models.

For example, in Claude, using Opus as an orchestrator to call Sonnet sub-agents, is a popular usage "hack." That only gets more powerful, as the Sonnet equivalent model gets cheaper. Now you can spawn entire teams of small specialized sub-agents with small context windows but limited scope.


Replies

alexsmirnovtoday at 4:05 PM

Exactly.

I did create my own MCP with custom agents that combine several tools into a single one. For example, all WebSearch, WebFetch, Context7 exposed as a single "web research" tool, backed by the cheapest model that passes evaluation. The same for a codebase research

Use it with both Claude and Opencode saves a lot of time and tokens.

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thinkcontexttoday at 4:05 PM

> But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets

Seems like a huge waste of money and electricity for processes that can be implemented as a traditional deterministic program. One would hope that tools would identify recurrent jobs that can be turned into simple scripts.

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jimbokuntoday at 6:22 PM

That is a very complex, high level use case that takes time to configure and orchestrate.

There are many simpler tasks that would work fine with a simpler, local model.