You do not need frontier models for everything.
For example, open models are great for automations.
If you are not sure where to adopt open models, start there.
It's one of the biggest changes I've made that contributed to a large percentage of my token usage moving to local or open models.
A huge percentage of my automations consist of repetitive tasks steered via self-tuned skills.
These skills become useful automations that work really well with these open models. I don't even need to tune the models, but that's also an option I am currently exploring for more complex tasks. The skill essentially takes care of that. And it works because of the in-context learning capabilities of these models.
If you don't run automations, it might be hard to figure this out. But I highly recommend you start somewhere.
Besides ending up with more efficient automations, I've managed to significantly reduce costs. I then use that extra budget to leverage more closed frontier intelligence for other creative and research-heavy tasks.
That's right! I use both closed and open frontier intelligence. This is not about vendor loyalty; this is about leveraging the best of all worlds.
Something I heavily advocate for is owning the harness and the model, and this practice I feel will allow me to better tap into all flavors of intelligence (open & closed).
Maybe too early, but I suspect this is going to become best practice when AI ROI dominates the discussion.
Model routing doesn't solve this. This requires tedious engineering, evals, and decision-making on your part. If you are developing your own harness, you are in the driver's seat and have more control over this important decision. This is why I strongly believe that companies will start to hire rapidly for harness engineering.
I am sharing a little snapshot of one example of an automation I run daily to track AI trending stories on HN. And I have a bunch of similar ones for different sources like arXiv, X, and so on. I also use it for some proactive agent sessions that keep track of important events around projects I build. You don't need frontier intelligence for this.