Comment by verelo

11 hours ago

This is the feeling i get too. Cant produce quality, but can produce something that is super fast...so take the wins where they are.

We don't have enough fast models, so I see this as a positive. I just test drove Gemini Flash Lite and it's crazy fast.

For a coding LLM specifically, when is fast a good tradeoff for quality?

  • > ...when is fast a good tradeoff for quality?

    When it is cheaper, and the "lower quality" model is adequate for the task at hand.

    Plenty of problems have a low(er) skill/intelligence floor, anyone who uses the dual-mode agent paradigm (plan, then act) figures out the second phase can be completed by a less capable model. Even when disregarding costs - speed is important here because the agent can rapidly iterate without human supervision, based on compiler errors, lint and test failures

  • A coding agent driven by a large LLM can delegate smaller tasks to a faster model. For example searching through the codebase for references, examples, or established patterns. They are treated as tools and don't pollute the main agent's context.

  • I wouldnt say it is, but there are circumstances when speed is helpful. I wouldn't argue that coding is one of them.