It's cheap but also lazy. It sometimes generates empty strings or empty arrays for tool calls, and then I just re-route the request to a stronger model for the

It's cheap but also lazy. It sometimes generates empty strings or empty arrays for tool calls, and then I just re-route the request to a stronger model for the tool call. I've spent a lot of time on prompts and tool-calls to get Flash models to reason and execute well. When I give the same context to stronger models like 4o or Gemini 2.5 Pro, it's able to get to the same answers in less steps but at higher token cost. Which is to be expected: more guardrails for smaller, weaker models. But then it's a tradeoff; no easy way to pick which models to use. Instead of SQL optimization, it's now model optimization.