Optimizing Claude Code: Opus for Plans, Sonnet for Execution
Proper-Mousse7182 · reddit · 2026-07-07
The author shares their journey of optimizing Claude Code usage: initially relying entirely on Opus for research, development planning, implementation, review, and testing, which led to rapidly depleting quotas.
They later discovered Opus excels at writing plans that "even dumber models can execute." Thus, they shifted to having Sonnet execute the plans in parallel windows, followed by an Opus review.
With the advent of agentic capabilities, Opus can now autonomously dispatch Sonnet sub-agents to execute plans while monitoring in real-time (requiring extra costs). Despite this, as project scope and token consumption grow, the weekly quota remains insufficient, prompting the author to explore further optimizations.
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