You Don't Need Opus for Everything

Given the right setup, you don't need Opus (or your most powerful model) for everything even for coding workflows.

In Claude code you can automate which model gets used for different skills by specifying it.

This week I'm staying on the right side of my usage limits by dropping to Sonnet or even Haiku when the full power of Opus isn't needed:

/feature — opus (the orchestrator + planner - also have /bugfix and /chore)
/workflow-confirm-plan — sonnet
/workflow-confirm-criteria — sonnet
/workflow-track-criteria-as-beads — sonnet
/workflow-branch-setup — sonnet
/workflow-tdd-cycle — sonnet
/workflow-verify-suite — sonnet
/workflow-visual-verify — sonnet
/workflow-showboat — sonnet
/workflow-finish-pr — sonnet
/workflow-linear-refine — sonnet
/workflow-review-learnings — sonnet
/iterative-review — sonnet
/prloop-enhanced — sonnet
/simplify (plugin) — sonnet ← just changed this, per /usage was eating 23% of my usage by itself
/followup — haiku

I can see a lot of this being mixed "bang for your buck" models with the right harness. Claude code is still the best one right now for multiple parallel, long running workflows mixed with subsidized tokens.

But we'll see what happens next week 😃

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