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fnordpigletyesterday at 10:16 PM3 repliesview on HN

I use larger models to organize work into a topologically sorted task graph and pin smaller models to the tasks depending on the complexity with a larger model evaluating the work and patching where necessary. This uses haiku quite often for routine work. I’m able to do multi hour highly complex work with superior results and a much lower bill as a result by doing this, with a parent orchestrator able to do a massive labor within a single context window by effectively organizing work and reviewing quality and integrating where needed. I don’t use haiku directly, but it’s often 30-40% of any major efforts token use. This further improves time to completion as well as cost - but I find haiku is better at following literal instructions and plans without “second guessing,” while opus class models second guess in their thinking constantly.

As such, haiku isn’t a waste of my time, it saves enormous amounts of time for me. But I spent a large amount of time building the orchestration system up front and iterating on it to get here. Interestingly i found my experience as a director and later a distinguished engineer gave me the tools to build it and get it working well and reliably end to end - the dynamics of multi agent workflows of varying capability is not a lot different than the dynamics of a 1000 engineer organization.


Replies

pshirshovyesterday at 11:05 PM

Everyone does that. But I don't find Haiku useful for actual coding tasks. Good to, ehm, generate commit messages and summaries.

In my tests, openweight Qwens and GLM are way better than it.

Phoenixhqtoday at 11:23 AM

Topologically sorted task graph is exactly right — the orchestrator/worker split maps cleanly to senior engineer delegating to juniors, where cheap models handle the leaf nodes fine.

lukevpyesterday at 10:26 PM

Got anything from your orchestrator you could share that’s usable by others? Sounds like how I’d like to work but is difficult to get going from scratch

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