On the Claude side of things I was previously following "strong model directs weak" with Fable directing Opus/Sonnet (its choice per-task). Since Opus 5.5 came out I've just been having Opus direct Opus.
The sub-agent separation is still valuable to keep context clean for the orchestrator, but I just have no reason to use Sonnet as the grunt-work implementer because I'm finding it hard to run out of tokens with Opus 5.5 on a $200 subscription plan. It's really really good at subjective quality of work per token used.
My work pays for Claude and cursor.
I have actually just dropped to using sonnet for everything, sure it does need some directing but I have yet to see a need to jump to opus.
To me it feels like sonnet/terra and composer 2.5 and grok 4.7 are actually good enough for most tasks and these companies are pushing the high models simply to make money.
I would probably go that route if I could use other harnesses with claude models, but I don't want to be locked in to claude code, and their API pricing (which you need to use it with other harnesses) is so much higher than subscription.
plenty of harnesses use the claude subscription