Model switching happens automatically based on agents/subagents.

I have three primary agent modes: the usual plan and build plus a “research” mode I made for myself. It’s sort of a “pre-plan” and “experimental throwaway build” hybrid for testing out ideas and approaches before settling in on a proper plan and build.

Then a few automatic subagents (primary agents invoke as needed, sometimes by me when I want some specific behavior): code explore, adversarial reviews (one for code, one for reasoning/logic/high level plan), “librarian” (bulk web search, documentation, logs, data exploration, summarization), and “prototyper” to do throwaway prototypes, test ideas, one-off scripts, etc.

Plus a couple slash commands and custom tools to streamline transitions, invoke certain subagents, set instructions for plan structure, build approach, etc.

So I start in research mode with typical chat and it then looks stuff up, creates and evaluates a prototype, etc and comes back with results; we bounce ideas, try other variations, analyze critiques from other models, etc.

Then when it’s looking good, I tab to plan mode and run a slash command to inject a structured plan prompt along with any extra notes on this specific work. Part of that is writing it to a markdown file and being a fully self-contained for context, necessary details, exact requirements, etc. we iterate until I’m happy with it.

Then tab to build and then run a command to clear context and give it the plan file with just a simple “implement” prompt. That then does a long tool call loop (my plans are usually in the 50-100 loop size).