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Comment by kbart | Hacker News Reader

Excuse my likely stupid question, but has anybody had some success using Claude Code with frontier agents (or Junie or anything else) to invoke local LLMs for specific sub-tasks or wrapped as skills? In other words, is there a way to use expensive, frontier models as orchestrators that manage local models to do the specialised coding tasks?

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That is my entire workflow in opencode through delegates. I have an "orchestrator" which uses matt pocock skills like grilling and writes specs in gh tickets. Once that is done it delegates individual tickets to deepseek v4 flash based developer subagent which executes the code pretty fast. This agent can only delegate one subagent which is a code-reviewer which uses a better model like qwen 3.7 for review. So dev does its own review loop before returning.

It's going amazingly. The orchestrator holds the big knowledge from grilling and also enables me to do more grilling to refine the specs. The trick was to check and re-align after each phase was developed. Also carefully defining each workflow step explicitly otherwise it makes mistakes like trying to self review the code. Also needed to define very explicit contracts. I chose the same surfaces as the matt skill set.

Do you have source code or config for this setup ?

It is just basic agent setup. When I get home in the evening I can isolate my agent files and share GitHub link. In a couple of hours.

Edit: So life got in the way and I couldn't isolate it. But I have made this project public and committed the dev and code review agents here.

https://github.com/rick2047/meuseum-game-new/tree/main/.open...

The delegate builder is too ugly to share yet. But to be honest just use the normal builder with a frontier model and instruct it to delegate to developer any developer task. That works well.

Of course you have to install the skills [1]

[1] https://github.com/mattpocock/skills

Sure, that would be very helpful.

I edited the comment above

Not able to access the link, may be it is a private repo.

Try these

https://gist.github.com/rick2047/113586b40c30206e45054a15080...

https://gist.github.com/rick2047/9a5544b2b9b6829f753380c6548...

Look into FastContext by Microsoft. Not extraordinary but specifically designed for paired usage with a larger LLM to save tokens [1].

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/fastcontext

This may be useful in this context: https://entelligentsia.github.io/is-grep-enough/fastcontext....

That repo suddenly seems to have gone missing. I get 404.

Oh, I just realized Microsoft removed it a couple weeks ago. I had the link in my bookmarks. The model is available on HuggingFace [1].

[1]: https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending&search=fastconte...

I'm working on the area in https://beolis.com.

The system as a whole is meant to support that use case, where each task (ticket in its jargon) can be tackled using a custom workflow that can each use a different agent/llm (so, it should support local LLMs if you have configured your coding agent to use them).

Sidenote: it's still not where I want, but getting there...

This may not be exactly what you're asking, but I've been running Hermes using different frontier models (like DeepseekV4-Pro, GLM-5.2, and others) as the heavy lifters but who also spawn agents to run my local models (mainly Qwen3.6-IQ4) for offloading tasks that are a good fit for a quantized model that's local. Works really well.

What for? Cost savings? Something else?

why would you want to use claude code?

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