You Do Not Need Claude Opus for Every Step. Here Is How to Cut Your Agent Costs by 90%. (opens in new tab)

Most teams building AI agents default to running every step through the same frontier model. That is the most expensive possible architecture and often not the best-performing one either. The Plan-and-Execute pattern fixes this by separating the work that actually requires expensive reasoning from the work that does not. A capable planner model breaks the task into steps. Cheaper executor models carry those steps out. In practice this means routing 70 to 90% of your token volume to models cos...