Comment by ilumanty
14 hours ago
For me, DS Flash quality is still insufficient for bigger / more complex tasks. DS has gotten better by a lot, but I prefer Opus 5.5 because it gets things right with much fewer tokens. DS also sometimes gets stuck in a thinking loop "hmm... hmmm... hmmmm hmm hmmmm..." which is hilarious when you check on it after 30 minutes
Totally makes sense, for me it was just that I observed its doing good work so that I never really need anything stronger.
btw. I'm not reviewing code in detail anymore. I only give direction and provide architecture design vision, its the model and couple of async agents working in the background and consuming work resulting in PRs which I manually approve after an eye-glance.
Are you doing a lot of specification up front?
The reason I personally like Opus 5.5 is that after using it quite a bit, I can just say something like: "Please take care of this compliance ticket." The model handles research, record keeping and code changes. Consistently and correctly.
I just don't have the level of trust in a lower end model. Even Opus 5.5 isn't quite ready for "driverless" in some architectural situations, usually around change management in the middle of implementing a system.
I was just kind of surprised to hear you were fairly hands off with a lower model like DS.
I always start with a plan - this is the time where the model can leverage existing AGENTS.md scattered across every level of the code, take a look at test cases and written product documentation commited to repo. Once the "design doc" looks ok, I ask for implementation as a PR - when its ready, all CI checks should be green and I get a summary of what was done and whether anything was missed.
I can ask for a review from another agent (they often find NITs) if I'm hesitating.