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by weitendorf 55 days ago
I find the most value to be in eval loops and multi-agent setups where a specialized or cheap model gets tasks that take load off the smarter model.

Most of the value in agentic development IMO is in the feedback loop/ability for the model itself to intelligently pull in context, but if you want to push a lot of context or have steps that are more proscribed, it's kind of a waste of money to have the big model do that. Much better to use it as a kind of pre-processing/noise-reduction step that filters out junk context.

I would say that right now the benefits are largest for this kind of work with medium-sized multimodal models. For example I have hooks/automation that use https://github.com/accretional/chromerpc to automatically screenshot UIs and then feed it into qwen-family models. It's more that I don't want to pay Opus to look at them or remember/be instructed to do that unless it goes through QA first.

1 comments

> I find the most value to be in eval loops and multi-agent setups where a specialized or cheap model gets tasks that take load off the smarter model.

Yes, in theory, this should hold up, at least according to evaluations.

According to real, practical use though, none of the open weight models are generally strong enough to handle coding and programming in a professional environment though, unless you have tightly controlled scope and specialized models for those scopes, which generally I don't think you have, but maybe it's just me jumping around a lot.

Even with feedback loops, harnesses and what not, even the strongest local models I can run with 96GB of VRAM don't seem to come close to what OpenAI offered in the last year or so. I'm sure it'll be ready at one point, but today it isn't.

With that said, if you know specific models you think work well as a general and local programming models, please share which ones, happy to be shown wrong. Latest I've tried was Qwen3.6-35B-A3B which gets a bit further but still instruction following is a far cry from what OpenAI et al offered for years.