I have experienced similar behavior between opus and haiku when benchmarking Dara engineering tasks. The “cheaper” model takes many more turns to figure out the task and this is without taking into account other important factors.

Another interesting behavior that I observed is that Haiku tended to cheat more maybe because it was having a harder time to find the root cause of the problem.

Benchmarking and evaluation of agentic systems is very interesting and if there’s one thing that someone should keep from the Databricks post is how important is for everyone to build and run their own.