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Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%

19 points2 hoursengineering.atspotify.com
solenoid09371 hour ago

So this is just delegating certain work to dumber models? I certainly wouldn't use Gemini 2.5 Flash (!!?) for code writing as suggested.

I've never had an issue with Codex or Claude reading massive files, they're really good at precise greps.

jnwatson52 minutes ago

It cuts token usage because they are using a different service with a different token budget for the reader/code writer tasks.

You can also just delegate this to subagents with Claude Code (though you have a more limited choice of models unless you swap the cheaper models via OpenRouter).

I'm OK using a dumb model as a smart grep, but the whole point of using the frontier models is using their intelligence for the hard stuff like coding.

tolugenius53 minutes ago

Isn't this a somewhat standard multi-model setup? there's nothing ground breaking here, just delegate claude to plan -> smaller model for implementation.

tetrisgm54 minutes ago

This is just offshoring but for models