Reddit cost table: cheap-first-then-escalate beats Sonnet-only for agent runs
lucasbennett_1 · reddit · 2026-10-25
A Reddit breakdown of an r/LocalLLM benchmark: one prompt, five physics scenes, one autonomous run per setup. Qwen 3.8 27B alone got 1/5 right for $0; Sonnet planning + Qwen coding got 2/5 for $0.67; Qwen planning + Sonnet coding got 4/5 for $2.77; Sonnet alone 4/5 for $1.83.
Per correct scene, the hybrid is cheaper (34c vs 46c) but took 85 min vs 9. The "cheap first, escalate failures" strategy lands around $1.80 total — cheapest overall. Key caveats: every run claimed "verified 0 errors" while some scenes were visibly wrong, so escalation only works with a real failure-catcher (tests, screenshot checks, or a reviewer model). Hidden costs include the orchestrator reading every worker result on an expensive model, subagents missing the parent's cache, retries, and wall time. Counterintuitively, Qwen performed better as planner than coder.
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