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TL;DR: No. Across all three rounds of experiments I ran, mixing “strong frontier planner + cheap executor” loses to just using Opus 4.7 alone in a mature harnes
by akitaonrails 6mo ago
TL;DR: No. Across all three rounds of experiments I ran, mixing “strong frontier planner + cheap executor” loses to just using Opus 4.7 alone in a mature harness. Solo Opus 4.7 in opencode delivers Tier A (97/100) in 18 minutes for ~$4 pay-as-you-go. No multi-agent combination beats that on quality, and no combination is cheaper at the same time. The exception is Codex GPT 5.4 xHigh + medium executor, which drops from ~$16/run to ~$1-3/run while losing 3 quality points. Useful if you only have GPT in your provider stack. For everything else, let the frontier model decide when to delegate on its own, especially if you’re on a Plus/Pro/Max subscription.