On the Claude side of things I was previously following "strong model directs weak" with Fable directing Opus/Sonnet (its choice per-task). Since Opus 5.5 came out I've just been having Opus direct Opus.

The sub-agent separation is still valuable to keep context clean for the orchestrator, but I just have no reason to use Sonnet as the grunt-work implementer because I'm finding it hard to run out of tokens with Opus 5.5 on a $200 subscription plan. It's really really good at subjective quality of work per token used.

My work pays for Claude and cursor.

I have actually just dropped to using sonnet for everything, sure it does need some directing but I have yet to see a need to jump to opus.

To me it feels like sonnet/terra and composer 2.5 and grok 4.7 are actually good enough for most tasks and these companies are pushing the high models simply to make money.

I would probably go that route if I could use other harnesses with claude models, but I don't want to be locked in to claude code, and their API pricing (which you need to use it with other harnesses) is so much higher than subscription.