xlayn
7 hours ago
If you use Qwen3.8 27B to manage, to orchestrate, do do shallow research, and then make it ask claude you will notice that Qwen can get out of Haiku, Sonnet and Opus almost as good answers... I was researching how good the model asnswers where, I can't get to work with anything but Fable, but Qwen can get good work from any of them. My theory is that if you make Qwen understand you, Qwen can elaborate as much as needed to get any of those models get good results, because it's filling in details. So using Qwen to direct claude also get's you amazing results way way cheaper...
Update: let me elaborate more, I read the HN entry about the team of 5 Qwens being close to fable quality... so I embarked to add to my harness (https://github.com/alainnothere/privibe because we all have one right?) and once I had added the orchestrate tool I had to now measure somehow it it's able to improve quality, so I claude and then Qwen to run a experiment to call my harness passing the model to use and ask them to do something, 3 rounds I think and see what quality came out of it... and as per the grading... qwen and claude agreed that the quality of the response comming out the harness using the orchestrate was VERY CLOSE, with opus and fable providing more "in my opinion you should" which matches my experience on why they are better.
One more update: I can't get copilot models to work decently, it may be my way of working... but I can get Qwen to follow what I try to do... if Qwen get's me he can then fire copilot cli and get amazing results by using copilot... bonus points seems like copilot cli is cheaper with the AIC (cost of the requests) so you can make the copilot subscription longer
drkleiner
7 hours ago
I do the opposite of this, use Qwen3.8-27B as subagents, Opus 5.5 as orchestrator and planner, never implementer, and it cuts my token usage significantly. So it is using Claude to direct Qwen. Never thought of the other way around, will give this a try soon as possible.
bluegatty
3 hours ago
Both of those orchestrations will work for sure.
Smart agent to orchestrate cheaper agents for labour.
Dumber agents to be very explicit about asking smarter agents for requests that require deep information.
This is a thing - the SOTA models really light up the more information you can provide them, and humans are too lazy / incapable of doing that in every prompt.
Entirely depends on what you are trying to do.
Edit: you can also use a smart agent to ask another smart agent, obviously, which is good for personal workflows.
seemaze
32 minutes ago
>you can also use a smart agent to ask another smart agent
What's the best method to have a 'smart' agent just.. ask itslef?
jeef_berky
5 hours ago
My goal was/is to have a local model as a "stable" part of the system, or at least a part of it that you have full control over, and have it reach out to the cloud for some Opus. In practice, to get results, I operate as you say.
At this point if I could do anything with zero effort or time, I would get Opus 5.5 to make a grand scheme, handoff to the local model, and give it ability to reach out to Opus again.
sixdimensional
an hour ago
I do something like this by using old rule-based bot tech as the first layer you hit, and if it hits any situation it does not understand deterministically, it shells out for help to an external "smarter" agent.
That way you can do old school intent matching and rule-based bots that work super well, and only shell out for deeper work.
ihuman
7 hours ago
What do you use to get Opus to call Qwen?
unrented7977
4 hours ago
I just fell Claude "there's an LLM server on this port serving this model, use it as a subagent"
Claude will write some scripts to call the LLM API and use it like any other tool.
I haven't found a pressing need for anything more complex than that. My multi-agent setups tend to be a pile of bespoke scripts per project anyway, an MCP server is only gonna get in the way. But I suppose this is because I self-host the models, if you're using OpenRouter or whatever it may need more complexity than a curl call to an unauthenticated port
lelandbatey
2 hours ago
Nah, OpenRouter is the same API as self hosting, but you need to provide your API key. It's as easy as a URL swap
hocusPokeUs
5 hours ago
So I use Google Gemini to plan or review; otherwise same loop so brain dumping how I get Gemini to Qwen/Gemma/Meta's model I forget the codename for; local agent reads the AI Studio log locally via Google Drive where they store the logs by default in a JSON format
So with the gdrive app for my OS it just looks like a local file path. Had the local agent learn to parse it.
I still prompt in AI studio direct as needed; local agents see the log change but cannot push back to Gemini their result.
Few reasons:
AI Studio is available where ever via browser, no VS Code or my usual vim setup to miss. I can switch between projects there as an idea hits and the agent switches up the local repo path and session history.
AI studio can search web, etc, etc already so my agent is less complicated with addons in general
Also using AI Studio between local agent turns has been my "human in the middle" approach; to have an explicit gap in the process and check each turn.
I only have a 24GB 3090 most models also take longer locally and I never hit the free tier limits with Gemini :D
Though the latest Meta model is twice as fast at 30B for me as other similar size models. 1-2 hour code gen and QA of build errors is now 30-50 minutes to parse latest changes from Gemini and get a successful build. The Meta model is pretty great at "fill in the middle" from a well structured plan.
Overall this loop feels like a normal workday pace. I freelance so I have a lot more say over that.
Blueskytech
2 hours ago
drkleiner
7 hours ago
Custom MCP with a variety of functions, I have different Qwen profiles with a variety of subagent numbers and cache pools, my default is 192k pool with 64k initial context that can grow 32k at a time up to 128k, allowing 3x64k, 2x96k or 1x128k and 1x64k subagents. Qwen uses Pi harness. Model I use specifically is ukisai/Swift-1.5-Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF
dev-in
5 hours ago
Why not using a proxy in claudecode to forward all the claude-* model to anthropic as a standard proxy forwarder and route other models to other providers (openrouter, vllm, ..)? This way Claude's model can get all the context from other models as all in the same harness. To use other models than claude-* you can use agents files.
Ps: as you won't use your proxy to distill or alter claudecode requests to anthropic you should be compliant with anthropic rules.
kadoban
43 minutes ago
Probably depends if you're trying to treat it as "subagent(s)" or as two different models working on the same stream of thought/context.
Both are, I think, valid options. Depends on the workflow you're looking for.
cjonas
3 hours ago
you can easily run qwen locally in a pi harness (or similar) and just tell claude code to delegate all implementation work to it. claude will even setup the harness with the local model
irthomasthomas
7 hours ago
Install the llm cli and tell opus to use it to prompt qwen.
verdverm
7 hours ago
You can have a setup like this with OpenCode agents, where you can define custom top-level agents, subagents, and assign specific models to each.
https://opencode.ai/docs/agents/
There are a lot of ways to do this if you stop using Big Ai harnesses that make it difficult to use models besides theirs.
nullstyle
7 hours ago
ohmypi will spawn subagents across different providers out of the box. Opus will spawn subagents running on my local ds4 installation just fine
rao-v
6 hours ago
Oh man I’m been playing with little -> big vs big -> little sub-tasking a bunch.
My sense so far is it’s very much about problem domain “taste” and there is no one correct answer (that is token cost efficient).
Does the smartest agent need the full flavor of the context of the problem to make real progress (i.e what’s been tried, how you’ve influenced the approach) or does the smartest agent really need a crisp problem definition and context room to really work.
make3
6 hours ago
I suspect that a lot of the fudging around with MCPs and tools can be delegated to smaller agents. Astra doesn't need to look at 300 websearch results directly or to extract text out of raw HTML
rao-v
an hour ago
Absolutely no matter whether you generally go big small or small big, you should always be like “ask haiku / Luna to check all X” or “see if there are other ways to Y”
koolba
7 hours ago
> My theory is that if you make Qwen understand you, Qwen can elaborate as much as needed to get any of those models get good results, because it's filling in details.
How is this different than just telling the model you’re using to fill in the gaps itself?
If you’re not manually reviewing the intermediate hop, how does that add to the “understanding you”?
xlayn
7 hours ago
there is no difference... each case may be different, I have a local qwen gpu setup... and is fast... but not as fast as claude. Fable is amazing and if it cost the same as my qwen setup I'll be running fable and never had qwen in first place. But Fable is crazy expensive, Qwen is not as fast but cheaper... Haiku is fucking dumb IN MY HANDS... BUT my local qwen is quick enough to be briefed, get the idea and delegate. I work with Fable mostly delegating to opus/sonnet and it's cheaper than just fable, I can't stand working with opus or the other models.
Why Qwen directing the others? For the things claude refuse, Qwen can make very specific questions and still get an answer without triggering the thing.
make3
6 hours ago
I think that his idea is that a lot of preparation / setup work is boiler plate / brain dead stuff that can be done by a shallower model.
It's like, find the relevant scientific papers by using Google search and the scientific paper MCPs, summarizing stuff, etc. Then the big model can come in and actually think on the artifacts
skeptic_ai
an hour ago
Big model can easily delegate to luna to do this task.
I ask task x -> big model thinks and delegate to luna heavy dumb work.
ninininino
7 hours ago
Anthropic has a native solution to this which is that you can use `/advisor` to adjust config to enable using Sonnet but set Opus as an advisor or use Haiku and then set Sonnet or Opus as advisor that the weaker model will automatically call when it thinks something warrants it:
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/advisor
It allegedly will automatically judge when to call the stronger model, not sure how much instructions in prompts or AGENTS.md can steer it.
jimbokun
6 hours ago
Add this to the things I never imagined when thinking about what a world with artificial intelligence might look like.