The business model for consulting is to have a plethora of ‘junior mice’ running around being very busy - and a lot fewer ‘king rats’ .. or ‘partners’ as they preferred to be called.

The juniors are cheaper - but if let loose can end up being a lot more expensive for two reasons

• their bill
• your time

This is a metaphor for LLM Models.

Think Haiku=Junior and (say) Opus 4.8 = Partner

My coding knowledge is such that in the early days I defaulted to whatever the top model was at the time and burnt through tokens at one hell of a rate. Knowing my skill level - friends recommended Haiku for ‘what I needed to do’. I switched and they were right.

Until now.

For the past few days I have been struggling with some refinements on the new blog design. Yesterday - waves of déjà vu kept sweeping over me, so ended the session with the usual pulling of updates into HandOff and the various startup docs I have been accumulating.

This morning I jumped immediately into Opus 4.8 and fixed a lot in a couple of hours. Not finished - will do some more later - but it is clear I have been using a junior mouse when I should have summoned the rat.

Lessons

An old adage from my early sales training days …

Price is what you pay. Quality is what you get.

💬 ‘Harry’ - god rest his soul.

Over the past few months I have massively increased my knowledge of ‘all things technical’ - not that even now, would attempt to do this revamp - BUT - as Claude is doing things I am finding it easier to spot some of its rubbish. BUT - I clearly do not know enough. That said - lesson for the duture Haiku ..

Mess up once - try again Mess up twice? Find the big rat.

Interesting that day before yesterday I asked Haiku if we could fix this by using a better model - and got a very specific NO.

Akin to watching a junior mouse getting it wrong and suggesting we wheel in a partner … ask one … see what they say.