Openrig
Does Haiku Fan-Out Replace Sonnet? Two Experiments in Code Review and Solution Discovery
I swapped the five Sonnet hunters in my code review pipeline for Haiku across 14 PRs with known bugs. Haiku found 20 of 26 defects to Sonnet's 21, produced 61% more raw findings, and used 28% more tokens. In a second test, 8 Haiku advocates plus an Opus adjudicator reached the same design family as 3 Sonnet advocates on all 3 decisions. The result: near-parity on recall, but no cost advantage in a validation-heavy pipeline.
Why I Built a Compaction System Instead of Handing Off to New Agents
When a long-running orchestrator hits context limits, the obvious move is to hand off to a fresh agent. I tried that. The startup overhead, lost momentum, and broken continuity made it worse than the problem it solved. So I built a daemon-managed compaction system instead: one that monitors context usage, writes ground truth to disk, runs a four-stage idle-gated restore protocol, and distills session knowledge into a wiki page. The daemon is the sole compaction authority; seats never self-compact. Recent research shows neither approach is categorically better, but for same-model orchestrators that accumulate judgment over time, daemon-managed compaction with external ground truth wins.
Surviving the Dumb Zone: A Checkpoint System for Claude Code's /compact
Claude Code's /compact command compresses your conversation to free context, but it silently drops external state mutations, abandoned approaches, and behavioral constraints. I built a precompact/postcompact checkpoint system that writes ground truth to disk before compaction and cross-checks it afterward — including live reconciliation against git, CI, and external systems. Here's the design, the research behind it, the failure modes it prevents, and how OpenRig's native compaction system eventually superseded these custom skills.