I’ve been building a SaaS platform with Claude Code, now over 300k lines of code. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt is that using cheaper models doesn’t necessarily mean using fewer tokens. I originally delegated simpler coding tasks to weaker models, thinking I’d save my usage allowance. Sometimes it worked brilliantly. Other times, a worker would get stuck trying to fix the same issue repeatedly. It would change the code, run the tests, fail, try another fix, fail again, and continue. I’ve had this go on for hours. The expensive part wasn’t the initial code generation. It was the repeated attempts, testing and accumulated context. I’ve since changed how I work: A lead agent coordinates tasks and reviews the results. Workers operate on separate branches. Tests are run in stages rather than rerunning everything after every small change. When a worker keeps failing, the task gets escalated to a stronger model instead of endlessly retrying. I start fresh lead sessions regularly, using project documentation to restore context. I’m still refining the process, but these changes have helped me stretch my Claude Code Max allowance much further. The lesson for me: optimise for the cost of getting a task completed correctly, not the cost of the model doing the task. I’m curious how others handle this. Do you start with cheaper models and escalate when needed, or have you found it more efficient to use a stronger model from the beginning? submitted by /u/Admir-Rusidovic
Originally posted by u/Admir-Rusidovic on r/ClaudeCode