# Haiku

The paid fallback for mechanical legs when the local model can't take them: inventories, conversions, structured extraction.

## What it is
The small fast tier: grep-and-report, file inventories, format conversions, structured-output extraction, rubric-based verification. It's the paid fallback for legs the free local model can't take — bigger context, tool use, or just availability.

## Why
Some legs need structure, not reasoning — extract, convert, inventory, report. The smallest paid model handles them reliably, and every leg it takes keeps a bigger model free for work that needs one.

## How Andrew uses it
Legs routed here get pre-chunked sources — small models thrash on whole-file reads — and a crisp rubric, because the tier is good at following structure and bad at inventing it. This page's chat answers stream from Haiku, grounded in retrieved graph context.

## How to get it
Available via the Claude API as the small tier. Chunk the inputs, fix the output schema, and it does mechanical work reliably for very little.

_Distilled from: method/models/haiku.md_
