Review Beats Planning: Dual-Model Interaction Patterns for Code Synthesis

arXiv 2603.03406·high signal

Instead of using a reasoning model to plan before a code specialist generates, flipping the pattern — letting the specialist generate freely then having the reasoning model review — achieves 90.2% pass@1, outperforming GPT-4o (87.2%) and O1 Preview (89.0%) using the same two models on the same hardware. The key insight: review is a higher-signal use of reasoning capacity than upfront planning. Directly actionable for anyone building multi-model coding pipelines today.