If the harness does it that's just like saying "please use a workaround". You'll lose fidelity and LLMs will lose the ability to count things or maintain relationships for schematics, etc

LLMs read images by splitting them up into e.g. 16x16 patches, which are then converted to embedding vectors and fed to the LLM, so from a technical point of view, feeding a big image as many 20x20 patches all at once is not too different from cropping subimages from the image, splitting those subimages into patches and feeding them to the LLM. Of course, the LLM has to be trained to understand that those images belong together, but it can be done.

You say "it can be trained" but they fail at counting in my use cases, let alone maintaining symbolic relationships.

Can you point me at one that can understand a detailed block diagram? Frontier is fine, soliciting recommendations