Matching Frontier Code Agents with Lightweight Models via Multi-Model Consultation

Frontier performance on code benchmarks is assumed to require frontier models—but does it? We demonstrate that Claude Haiku 4.5, a lightweight model, achieves 74.6% on SWE-bench Verified, matching Claude 4.5 Opus (74.4%) at 62% lower cost per instance. Our approach combines two complementary strategies: a baseline single-agent and multi-model consultation via Polydev MCP, which queries GPT 5.2 Codex and Gemini 3 Flash Preview. The best single policy achieves 66.6% (95% CI: [62.3%, 70.6%]); taking the best result from either policy yields Resolve@2: 74.6% (95% CI: [70.5%, 78.3%]). Key insight: The approaches exhibit only 76% overlap in solved instances (Jaccard J = 0.76), with 24% of successes coming from one approach succeeding where the other failed. McNemar's test shows no systematic dominance (p = 0.29), indicating balanced bidirectional complementarity. Consultation helps most for multi-file changes (78.2%) and ambiguous requirements (84.7%), but can add noise for simple fixes. Our results suggest inference-time scaling—through agent turns, extended thinking, and model diversity—can substitute for training-time model scale.