In agentic and multi-step pipelines, reserve the frontier model for orchestration and hard reasoning, and delegate bulk subtasks (search, read, extract) to a cheaper model.
Use a Big Model as the Planner, Small Models as the Workers
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🎚️Model Selection
60-80% on routed traffic
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40-70% when most queries are easy
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Don't Burn Reasoning Tokens on Tasks That Don't Reason
Model selection isn't just which model — it's which reasoning mode. Turn thinking down or off for straightforward work and reserve deep reasoning for genuinely hard problems.