✨ The Sorting Hat

"Not every task deserves the expensive wizard. Opus plans, Sonnet toils, Haiku fetches — Opus returns to judge."

The thesis: use the top model as a planner and judge, not an executor. Architecture, decomposition, and final review reward the strongest model; mechanical execution mostly doesn't. An agent roster with no declared tiers runs everything on the session default — usually the most expensive model doing the least discriminating work.

What to scan

Every agent definition (.claude/agents/*.md and plugin agents), each one's model: frontmatter (or its absence), its tool set, and what its body actually asks it to do.

Classification

Read the agent's task shape, not its name:

Edge rules:

• An agent that both builds and self-reviews is a builder — the judging belongs in a separate judge pass, which is the whole point of the split.
• Read-only auditors whose findings block a merge are judges even when cheap to run wrong — a plausible-but-wrong finding costs more than the model saved.
• When genuinely torn, tier UP for verdict-producers, DOWN for artifact-producers.

When this spell has no subject

Fewer than about five agents: report the classification table and stop. Do not prescribe a decision record, do not prescribe a lint. Both are drift-control for a roster large enough to drift; on three agents the frontmatter is the policy, and a human reading three files is the enforcement. Prescribing governance for two lines of YAML is the scale inversion this book grades elsewhere.

A missing model: is not automatically a finding. Inheriting the session model is the right call when the agent's cost is negligible, or when the user's plan may not grant the tier you would pin — a hard pin to a model the account cannot reach fails at dispatch, which is worse than an untiered agent. Flag a missing model: only when the agent is frequently dispatched and its role tier differs from the session default, and say which of the two you observed.

Anti-patterns to find

1. No model: on a frequently-dispatched agent whose tier differs from the session default — it silently inherits whatever the session runs, which is the wrong tier by the roster's own classification. (On a small roster, or where the inherited tier is already correct, this is not a finding — see above.)
2. Judge on a builder tier (a reviewer pinned to a small model to save cost).
3. Mechanical work on the top tier (a rename bot inheriting Opus).
4. Tier decided at dispatch time per call — callers guess differently; the definition is the single source.
5. No enforcement — nothing makes the NEXT agent declare a tier, so the roster drifts back.

Fix prescriptions

• Emit the full classification table: agent · current model · role · prescribed model · one-line rationale. The user approves before edits.
• Apply as model: frontmatter edits — one per agent definition. Use the alias (opus / sonnet / haiku / inherit), never a dated model ID: IDs age out and a stale one fails at dispatch. Where the account may not hold the top tier, prefer inherit for judges and pin only the down-tiers.
• On a roster of about five or more: record the policy as a decision doc (ADR or equivalent) so the tiers are argued once, not re-litigated per agent.
• On a roster of about five or more: add the lint — a wiring or CI check that every agent definition declares model:. The check, not the doc, is what keeps the roster sorted. Below that size the lint governs less than it costs.
• Derived, never typed: if the repo documents the roster (a README table), generate the tier column from the frontmatter — a hand-typed copy drifts.

Bounds

• Scope: agent definitions and their frontmatter. Nothing else, and never the user's interactive session model.
• Cap: the full classification table is the deliverable, so no cap applies — but findings (mis-tiered agents) rank at 15.
• Done when every agent has been classified once. A repo with no agents gets SCANNED NOTHING and grades N/A, never O.
• Quote once, at read time; mark anything you cannot re-confirm UNVERIFIED rather than re-reading to check yourself.
• See skills/opus-pocus/references/casting-safety.md for the full rules.

Report format

The classification table, the count of agents changed per direction (up-tiered / down-tiered / newly declared), the estimated spend impact (which frequent agents moved down), and the lint status (exists / prescribed). SCANNED NOTHING if the repo has no agents.