I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to beat plain Claude Code and Codex with a variety of planner/critic/decomposition orchestration setups. Every one produces less or same quality, 2x+ tokens, more latency and a second system to debug. External orchestration seems like I’m just creating technical debt and the actual value is focusing exclusively on providing clearer specifications (ie statements of intent, constraints and input/output contracts) to the model and just letting the leading frontier model do its thing with reasoning and effort maxed out.

Ironically the real orchestration benefit is on the human side refining intent to model instead of orchestrator to agent, invoking AskUserQuestion and other tools for the model to more deeply disambiguate my requests.