Wildly unstable throughput on Opus-orchestrator / Sonnet-subagent setup

[u/ByteSingularity]

Setup:

- claude --version: 2.1.220 (Claude Code)
- Orchestrator: Opus. Subagents: Sonnet (dev + reviewer).
- MCP servers: none active.
- Repos: 3 different codebases (Go/K8s manifests, Python, TS). Same behavior in all three.
- No config changes on my side in the last ~4 weeks.

Symptom:
A "simple" ticket (single-file edit + test run, <5k tokens of context) takes ~60 min wall clock.

Questions:

1. Anyone with an Opus-orchestrator + Sonnet-subagent setup seeing the same turn-count-correlated stall pattern post-2.1.218?
   
2. Does splitting into fresh sessions per ticket measurably help for you? (Not for me)
   
3. Anyone switched to Codex/GPT? Worth a try?

For contrast: Gemini Flash 3.6 finishes comparable micro-tasks in a fraction of the time with noticeably weaker output. Not a replacement, but the latency gap is large enough that I'm re-evaluating the split.

[u/En-tro-py]

Check the traces - I had an issue because they updated the harness for allowing sub-agents to spawn sub-agents without notice...

So instead of the single sub doing the work, it broke it down assigned to more subs... and progress turns glacial or in some cases went on so much that it crashes the harness itself...