Setting specific models for specific subagent tasks?

[ConnorDouglasMoen]

Is this possible? Like, if I have a smaller multimodal model specifically for vision tasks, can late be set up to call only that model on subagents spawned for vision tasks?

[mlhher]

You can already set different models for subagents and for the orchestrator. Please check the Hybrid Routing section in the Quickstart Guide.

If you mean to parse the natural language and thus decide to route the task to a specific model I do not think this is a good idea comparing the complexity (and dependencies introduced) in comparison to the value gained as you can always just tell the orchestrator "Please instruct a subagent to do xyz". The architecture will still work and the orchestrator will instruct the subagent to do the task and then automatically return its result to the orchestrator.

[ConnorDouglasMoen]

Yes, I was referring to the latter - it's something OpenCode offers that I think is really nice. I'll admit its use case is rather niche, as most often it works great to just use your best model as the orchestrator and the subagents - but yesterday I ran into the situation (referenced above) where it would have been awesome if I could specifically invoke a multimodal model for a subagent executing a multimodal task, and leave the default subagent as-is.

The juice just might not be worth the squeeze, though, I hear you.

[ConnorDouglasMoen]

Now that I think about it, support for easily switching models for the primary agent would be great, too (again, I'm coming from OpenCode where this was very well implemented, and was nice for switching between coding tasks with coding models, and more general tasks with more general models).

I get that this is a fairly coding-centric harness, though, so maybe outside of its scope

[mlhher]

I assume you are referring to being able to set the model for a specific instance without affecting the general configuration. If that is correct, that is already possible using the environment variables again referring to the Quickstart Guide. If you mean something else please explain, I am always open to feature requests.

The natural language routing is neat but not something worth the complexity right now. Might be something to look at if people start asking for more features that would require hooks (like this); could maybe be a thing for a plugin system.

[ConnorDouglasMoen]

Oh you're right about env vars working well enough for that already!