The iteration speed advantage is real but context-specific. For agentic workloads where you're running loops over structured data -- say, validating outputs or exploring a dataset across many small calls -- the latency difference between a 50 tok/s model and a 1000+ tok/s one compounds fast. What would take 10 minutes wall-clock becomes under a minute, which changes how you prototype.

The open question for me is whether the quality ceiling is high enough for cases where the bottleneck is actually reasoning, not iteration speed. volodia's framing of it as a "fast agent" model (comparable tier to Haiku 4.5) is honest -- for the tasks that fit that tier, the 5x speed advantage is genuinely interesting.