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> The subagent is just as intelligent

Isn't it a common practice to use cheaper models to do the grunt work?

Does this actually work for anybody? In my experience, when you use cheaper models as subagents, the more expensive parent agent ends up reading all of the subagent's work and surrounding code into context anyway to review it. So you end up paying more, not less.

Plus the subagent's work is often subpar and the parent ends up requesting multiple revisions. Each back and forth burn unnecessary tokens as well as my time.

Where it might work well is for separate task categories like image generation - get the parent to ask for an image from another model that is better at this aspect

When I am making agents do a hard thing, I use Opus as both parent and child. I make the child review its code extensively, and then still make the parent read the work and review once again. It is much faster and cheaper than just rolling with no extra reviews, and then in a day I have fifty subtle bugs.

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