A Fair Benchmark for Agent Architecture: Crossing Workflow Decomposition with Model Routing
jonah_omninode · reddit · 2026-08-25
The author proposes a coding-agent evaluation design addressing how most benchmarks collapse the model and its harness into one score, making it impossible to attribute failure to model capability, context assembly, decomposition, tool design, retry policy, or the acceptance gate.
The experiment crosses two variables: workflow (monolithic task vs. decomposition into bounded slices with explicit contracts and acceptance criteria) and model policy (frontier-only vs. cheapest-capable with escalation after capability-graded failure).
Key controls: freeze original tasks, tools, retry budgets, acceptance criteria, and the verifier; all four cells are judged on the same final delivered outcome rather than the persuasiveness of the agent's report. Primary metrics: cost per independently accepted change, false acceptance/rejection, first-pass accepted yield, verification time, and reproducibility across three fresh runs.
The biggest unresolved confound is budget normalization: decomposition naturally creates more calls, and equalizing per-slice budgets would subsidize the decomposed condition, while a shared system-level budget may hide which slices needed more capacity. No results yet — the author emphasizes making the comparison falsifiable before seeing outcomes.
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