So I’ve spent an excessive amount of time building out my AI delivery factory. Most recently that effort has been focused on effective load sharing between a Claude and GPT subscription. The data we’ve been collecting is starting to point very strongly at orchestration being the highest role based consumer of available usage, and that the model orchestrating has a massive impact on outcomes. Funny thing … at first I was using Fable because it’s brilliant, but the cost was just unjustifiable for orchestration. Downgraded to Opus… better but still Claude usage was significantly outpacing GPT usage. So I downgraded to Sonnet, and remarkably I’m finding it’s both more cost effective AND producing better results as an orchestrator. Here’s my theory: Orchestration itself when done correctly is not a task that demands high reasoning. Forcing the orchestrator to delegate essentially everything to native subagents or external headless sessions is critical. It will constantly come up with excuses to in-line stuff given enough time and reasoning power. Orchestrator availability matters just as much if not more than orchestrator reasoning assuming you have given it appropriate access to a higher reasoning model to consult with. If your orchestrator is constantly busy it’s not orchestrating. Sonnet is winning this competition for me because it’s cheap to run for the entirety of a long duration session and it’s not so smart that it chases every theoretical tail. It’s quite good at just letting the system around it work while it steers the session itself. TLDR; For me, Sonnet is proving to be more cost effective and efficient at session orchestration than both Opus and Fable. submitted by /u/berndalf
Originally posted by u/berndalf on r/ClaudeCode