Comment by 14u2c

7 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.

4 comments

14u2c

CharlieDigital 7 hours 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 7 hours 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 6 hours 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.
  
  1 reply →