Orchestrating Sonnet subagents can cost more than Opus 5.5 on medium effort
Odd-Shift-640 · reddit · 2026-10-26
A user describes using a custom skill to have Opus 5.5 (High) orchestrate Sonnet 5.5 subagents for coding, then learning that Sonnet 5.5 on high effort is actually more expensive than Opus 5.5 on medium.
He doesn't know what effort level his orchestrator picks for the Sonnet agents, and asks whether people explicitly instruct subagents in their skills to limit effort — why accept Sonnet 5.5 on high if Opus 5.5 medium is more efficient? Should subagents be capped at medium, or even low for small tasks?
More from coding & agent
- License gotchas when picking an open source OCR model for commercial use — TangeloOk9486 · 2026-10-26
- Mistral ships Voxtral 3: speech models and Voice Agent SDK across 50+ languages — AxSaucedo · 2026-10-26
- skillEd: auditable agent evals via CLI and MCP, evidence over agent summaries — MiserableFlatworm337 · 2026-10-26
- Anthropic built Scion to replace git as AI-driven merges jumped from 2,500 to 30,000/day — bibryam · 2026-10-26
- DecisionPivot: 40k-item benchmark shows item accuracy hides LLM decision-model gaps — RexDouglass · 2026-10-26
- A single successful run is a weak release signal for variable agents — MiserableFlatworm337 · 2026-10-26