Definition

Orchestration pattern that sends routine tasks to cheaper specialized models and escalates hard cases to frontier models — optimizing cost/performance in agentic harnesses.

Key Points

  • mdash uses mai-cyber-1-flash for ~90% of work and escalates ~10% to larger models (e.g. GPT-5.4)
  • Microsoft claims ~50% cost reduction vs prior MDASH stack — company-reported

Sources