alt Hacker NewsThere are a lot of ways to slice the problem of getting the agents to complete a goal without getting lost, and the right solutions are somewhat problem-specific. For the projects I've done 35B Qwen is about the smallest that seems to make useful progress in a general purpose harness while 4B Qwen is workable with a task-specific harness. At the lower end the plan has to be traditional search/planner techniques in code not something the model has any control over, of course that limits the kinds of problems that fit. The high end coding models are perfectly capable of making a functional 1-off harness for those jobs so it ends up not being that bad to implement.
Yeah it's exactly what I've seen as well. Ordewell is close to your high end case: a frontier model builds the plan once, then it's fixed, the executing model can't reinterpret it. Won't get you to 4B, but should help a small model that only has to execute, not plan and execute at once.