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points by piterrro 2 days ago | 0 comments

I'm still using DS-flash - it beats frontier model on speed and cost keeping good enough code quality. It depends on the harness and constraints you give to the model but for most of the tasks its a great fit, I have not switched from DS since couple of weeks already (previously I would switch to Opus for some heavier work but I stopped recently).

My harness consists of multi-level AGENTS.md and SOUL.md containing "grug brain developer" and "asd-ste100" type of speech for clearer communication.

[–] ilumanty 2 days ago

For me, DS Flash quality is still insufficient for bigger / more complex tasks. DS has gotten better by a lot, but I prefer Opus 5.5 because it gets things right with much fewer tokens. DS also sometimes gets stuck in a thinking loop "hmm... hmmm... hmmmm hmm hmmmm..." which is hilarious when you check on it after 30 minutes

[–] piterrro 2 days ago

Totally makes sense, for me it was just that I observed its doing good work so that I never really need anything stronger.

btw. I'm not reviewing code in detail anymore. I only give direction and provide architecture design vision, its the model and couple of async agents working in the background and consuming work resulting in PRs which I manually approve after an eye-glance.

[–] XenophileJKO 2 days ago

Are you doing a lot of specification up front?

The reason I personally like Opus 5.5 is that after using it quite a bit, I can just say something like: "Please take care of this compliance ticket." The model handles research, record keeping and code changes. Consistently and correctly.

I just don't have the level of trust in a lower end model. Even Opus 5.5 isn't quite ready for "driverless" in some architectural situations, usually around change management in the middle of implementing a system.

I was just kind of surprised to hear you were fairly hands off with a lower model like DS.

[–] piterrro 1 day ago

I always start with a plan - this is the time where the model can leverage existing AGENTS.md scattered across every level of the code, take a look at test cases and written product documentation commited to repo. Once the "design doc" looks ok, I ask for implementation as a PR - when its ready, all CI checks should be green and I get a summary of what was done and whether anything was missed.

I can ask for a review from another agent (they often find NITs) if I'm hesitating.