Hamel breaks down Cursor's agent swarm economics: match AI model capability to the task instead of defaulting to frontier models. Stepping down one tier cuts inference costs 10-20x. Better UX tools could automate model routing for different sub-tasks.
For the AI builders out there, Hamel, could you summarize again, like some of your thoughts of this token economics, like agent swarm economics article from Cursor? Like what should AI builders be thinking about when it comes to maximizing the value of their tokens with this agent swarm method?
Yeah, I mean, it looks like you should use the right model for the task. Like there's just like the article says, like you don't need frontier intelligence for everything. So don't use it for everything because frontier intelligence is like significantly more expensive. Than just like one level down. If you go like a few levels down in intelligence, now all of a sudden it's like, I don't know, like 10, 20 times cheaper. So yeah, I mean, I think we already knew that, but it is good to quantify this. It would be good if the UX of doing this was better. I think there is some things that you can use that's like, I haven't used Cursor in a little bit. It could be like auto mode. And I'm curious if this is what auto mode does, like does routing for you.
