Explain the execution flow of a Sonnet 5 to Opus 5 escalation pipeline?

An incoming task first routes to Claude Sonnet 5 as the default handler, typically configured at a moderate effort level appropriate to the pipeline's typical task difficulty, since most requests in a well-scoped, high-volume pipeline are expected to be within Sonnet 5's comfortable capability range.

As Sonnet 5 processes the request, the pipeline monitors for escalation signals: an explicit failure or error, a low-confidence or incomplete result, a request for retry, or a classification of the task as unusually complex either by the application logic or by signals surfaced during Sonnet 5's own processing.

When an escalation signal fires, the same task, potentially with additional context accumulated during the failed Sonnet 5 attempt, gets re-routed to Claude Opus 5, typically at a higher effort level, to take advantage of its deeper reasoning capability specifically for the subset of tasks that Sonnet 5 struggled with.

Successfully completed tasks, whether resolved at the Sonnet 5 stage or after Opus 5 escalation, return through a common response path, while the pipeline separately logs which stage actually resolved each task - valuable both for cost and quality monitoring and for periodically re-tuning the escalation criteria as the task distribution or either model's capabilities evolve over time.

flowchart TD
  A[Task arrives] --> B[Route to Sonnet 5, default effort]
  B --> C{Escalation signal? Failure, low confidence, high complexity}
  C -- No --> D[Return Sonnet 5 result]
  C -- Yes --> E[Re-route to Opus 5, higher effort]
  E --> F[Return Opus 5 result]
  D --> G[Log resolving stage]
  F --> G