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Discussion on: Speed vs smarts for coding agents?

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Harsh

The honest answer is: it depends on where in the workflow the agent is sitting.

For inline autocomplete and small edits speed wins completely. Any latency breaks the flow. I'd rather have a fast, slightly dumber suggestion than a brilliant one that takes 3 seconds to appear.

But for anything involving reasoning across files, architecture decisions, or debugging something non-obvious I'll wait. The cost of a fast wrong answer is higher than the cost of a slow right one. A quick confident hallucination in a complex debugging session can send you down the wrong path for 30 minutes.

So I've started thinking of it less as speed vs smarts and more as: reversibility of the task. Easy to undo? Give me speed. Hard to undo? Give me the smartest model available.