Comment by rao-v
19 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.
> Oh man I’m been playing with little -> big vs big -> little sub-tasking a bunch.
I too wonder the same...
The real-world provides us many examples of such big -> little, or smart -> not-as smart workflows. For instance, we don't typically ask juniors or mid-level SDEs to design solutions to exceedingly challenging problems for a reason. However there are _some_ areas that those with less experience can tackle that is relatively risk-free if their work is reviewed by a more experienced engineer, which leads me to a conclude that it's task dependent.
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
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”