Models, models everywhere

Models. Big huge scary models. Small, purpose-built models. Slow models. Fast models. Expensive models. Local models. Models. Models. Models. Which model should you pick for your question, task, or goal? How much of your usage budget will you use when you do? Could it have been done by a lesser model for less usage? As the frothy sea of AI continues to ebb and flow this seems to be one of the more challenging and hard to answer questions for those of us using AI agents to help us with our everyday workload. The answer to this question doesn’t yet seem clear. Orchestration; which asks a single agent/model pair to delegate work to lesser agent/model pairs is one leading answer. And it works in some contexts. For example: “Do this big task” can be planned with a larger more capable model and then delegated to one or several more sub-agents and cheaper models to do laser targeted work. In practice, this works pretty well and the tooling for this is beginning to mature to the point it…