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I use the frontier models only in plan mode; coding is held out to cheaper models.

I run Paseo as an orchestrator with agent profiles. "Distinguished Member of Technical Staff" -> Fable, plan mode. "End-User Customer Advocate" -> Astra, plan mode. A few others. Basically, these agents (with profile prompts) can only be "consulted" for input on design elements; it's OK if they produce a bit of verbosity here. This has worked fantastically for me, really awesome to see a self-constructed team own the work end-to-end.

A "Director of Engineering" (6.1 Sol or Opus 5.5) also in plan mode organizes the team for the task and then owns coordination and instruction. You can think of this in essence like a "model router".

Coding is handled by Haiku 5.5/GPT 6 Luna/DeepSeek v4.1 Flash. One "Principal Engineer" Sonnet 5.5 or 6.1 Sol for some tasks.

grim_io 3 hours ago [ - ]

You are deep in it.

You may be larping for no additional benefit vs just using Opus 5.5 and just asking it to implement a feature.

14u2c 2 hours ago [ - ]

You are correct, at least based on my experimentation. This subagent workflow really only delivers meaningful results when working across model families (ex: Opus asking Astra for a review) or when working across conceptual hardware boundaries (cloud offloading to local inference, etc). The planner / overseer model ends up reading all the output of the coder model anyway, at least if you want quality output, so there's not much benefit otherwise.

CharlieDigital an hour ago [ - ]

    > The planner / overseer model ends up reading all the output of the coder model anyway

I mean, even that's fine because output tokens cost ~5x input tokens. So that's still a win if the agent that does the heavy code reading and writing produces output that may be read again by the lead (not my observation of how agents in Paseo interact and of course, correctable to degrees with shared system prompt).

Here's a snippet of a sample prompt downwards from the lead for a piece of code I'm working on:

    From agent: 3ff73f80-9713-458c-8271-d275f03609c6

    <role>
    You are the Principal Engineer on <snipped ... /> (.NET 11 / Vue MCP server; read CLAUDE.md in your working directory first). ...
    </role>

    <lead_role>
    I am the Director of Engineering. The System Architect and the DMTS reviewed this approach ...
    </lead_role>

    <sniped ... />

    <comms>
    Run all gating commands in the FOREGROUND. End your turn ONLY with the final report: pass/fail per success criterion (a)-(i) with evidence, the branch tip SHA and `git log --oneline origin/main..HEAD`, lines added/deleted, the exact 0factor image digest and version you pinned, every deviation from this brief and why, risks you saw,...
    </comms>

The agent is given explicit "comms" instructions upwards and I find that both agents in this exchange stick to the contract.

14u2c an hour ago [ - ]

> even that's fine because output tokens cost ~5x input tokens.

That's assuming you come in under a certain threshold of revisions, and excludes the tokens generated for all the exchanges. The later can be be significant, especially when there are significant issues to correct.

CharlieDigital 11 minutes ago [ - ]

All I can say is give it a try. We can debate hypotheticals all day, but it costs nothing to try and see.

The Paseo harness/orchestrator is doing something right. I switched from TUI after trying it as a candidate for a non-TUI user.

It's not the same behavior as Claude starting a Claude sub-agent.

CharlieDigital 3 hours ago [ - ]

Nah; I can use my token budget across both providers this way, use tokens more sparingly with smaller models for heavy text in/out (why pay Opus prices to babysit a PR? run tests?), and you'd be surprised when the agents talk to each other and "role play" how much this improves things like the UX as well as technical design which are more subjective.

Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, for example, is asked to "expand the solution space" which I find has a strong effect on approaches considered (it doesn't know what was already considered on the main thread; only the domain and problem space).

This also helps with context growth since the sub-agents do the heavy lifting (e.g. search, read docs) and just provide the key bits back to the lead.

Like you, I was a single-model, single-TUI user up until three weeks ago when I picked up Paseo and it is the only tool that I've found that has significantly positively improved my throughput without sacrificing quality of product.

Is it "larping"? I ran an eval today on a contract ingest and extract agent I'm working on. Changing the <role> fragment of the prompt lifted the results by +7 points by simply changing the text to the effect of "You are a senior partner at a prestigious law firm that focuses on reading licensing contracts..." and some bits about the content the agent is reviewing + objective. No one would believe it without an eval.

Claude docs explicitly say to LARP[0]:

    > Give Claude a role
    > 
    > Setting a role in the system prompt focuses Claude's behavior and tone for your use case. Even a single sentence makes a difference

My conclusion: the agents like to LARP so I'm happy to LARP with them.

[0] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

what 2 hours ago [ - ]

He has to be deep in it because it’s the product he sells.

CharlieDigital an hour ago [ - ]

Paseo is open source (https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo, Apache 2.0) and not my project; not affiliated.

I have other products and I work for private equity (no affiliation with Paseo at all).

You've entirely missed the lede.