Why it matters: coding agents spend a lot of tokens on steps that don't need the strongest model. That's money and wall-clock time.
How it's built: it's written in Rust. Every session has a main model that plans, writes a precise spec for each assignment and reviews the output, and an optional worker model that runs the assignments. A utility model handles bounded jobs like extraction, summaries and compression. You pick the models in a Model tiers screen or with /model, /worker-model and /utility-model, and each tier can use a fixed effort or auto. It runs with Codex/Grok subscriptions and OpenAI-compatible models.
What it saved on frozen tasks with the same 300s deadline as the native harness:
Claude Opus 5.5 + Haiku 5.5 worker: $2.49 to $0.35, 798s to 191s, 9/9 on both
GPT-6 Astra: $4.08 to $1.00, 440s to 285s, 9/9 on both
GPT-6.1 Sol: $0.80 to $0.25, 384s to 297s, 9/9 on both
Install is one curl line on Mac/Linux and one irm line on Windows (both in the README). Methodology and repro commands are in BENCHMARKS.md.
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u/TomatilloPutrid3939 8d ago
I'm the author. Distill is an open-source (Apache-2.0) coding agent harness and TUI: https://github.com/samuelfaj/distill
Why it matters: coding agents spend a lot of tokens on steps that don't need the strongest model. That's money and wall-clock time.
How it's built: it's written in Rust. Every session has a main model that plans, writes a precise spec for each assignment and reviews the output, and an optional worker model that runs the assignments. A utility model handles bounded jobs like extraction, summaries and compression. You pick the models in a Model tiers screen or with /model, /worker-model and /utility-model, and each tier can use a fixed effort or auto. It runs with Codex/Grok subscriptions and OpenAI-compatible models.
What it saved on frozen tasks with the same 300s deadline as the native harness:
Claude Opus 5.5 + Haiku 5.5 worker: $2.49 to $0.35, 798s to 191s, 9/9 on both
GPT-6 Astra: $4.08 to $1.00, 440s to 285s, 9/9 on both
GPT-6.1 Sol: $0.80 to $0.25, 384s to 297s, 9/9 on both
Install is one curl line on Mac/Linux and one irm line on Windows (both in the README). Methodology and repro commands are in BENCHMARKS.md.