I agree. I find even Haiku good enough at managing the flow of the conversation and consulting larger models - Gemini 2.5 Pro or GPT-5 - for programming tasks.

Last few days I am experimenting with using Codex (via MCP ${codex mcp}) from Gemini CLI and it works like a charm. Gemini CLI is mostly using Flash underneath but this is good enough for formulating problems and re-evaluating answers.

Same with Claude Code - I am asking (via MCP) for consulting with Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Never had much success of using Claude Code as MCP though.

The original idea comes of course from Aider - using main, weak and editor models all at once.