haiku-45-preferred-over-gpt4o-mini-for-routine-stages-anthropic-ecosystem

When designing hybrid LLM strategies for multi-stage pipelines, prefer Haiku 4.5 over GPT-4o-mini for routine/non-critical stages. This keeps the entire stack within the Anthropic ecosystem (no external API keys, unified billing, consistent model behavior), while Opus 4.6 handles the 8 critical reasoning stages. This was explicitly corrected from an initial GPT-4o-mini recommendation during the ResearchClaw design session.