Wanted 2026-08-22, for later. Before arming anything, a commander weighs how hard the job actually is and
proposes which model each half should run on.
TWO models, which is what makes it more than a generic "use something cheaper" note. A commander's own turns
are conversation plus one piece of bash; the agent its loop spawns does the real work and its difficulty is
set by the job. The deploy commander is the worked example — its own turns were unremarkable on Sonnet while
the spawned agent judged six hosts, parsed a plan, decided what to skip and wrote an honest report.
Suggested, never imposed: the failure mode of choosing too small is not a slower answer, it is a watcher
firing on the wrong condition or an agent half-finishing a deploy.
Recorded with the reason it is not urgent: nothing measures whether the choice was right. A spawned agent's
cost is not captured at all yet — the column exists and is always null — so a commander suggesting Haiku has
no way to learn it was wrong. This wants the cost work first, or at least the knowledge that until then it is
a judgement with no feedback loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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