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.
More from coding & agent
- Cognition's SWE-2 uses a KKT duality argument in RL to shift the effort Pareto curve — YouJiacheng · 2026-09-11
- First-ever Three.js Conference lands in Paris, with a panel on AI-shortened design workflows — OdinLovis · 2026-09-11
- Data engineering, not agent frameworks, is the real bottleneck for enterprise AI agents — dhruv2038 · 2026-09-11
- RTK Terminal Compression Cuts Tokens but Leaves Your AI Coding Bill Unchanged — Bartaseth · 2026-09-11
- GPT-6 Astra beats Factorio with enemies in 44 in-game hours at ~$4,500 API cost — liminal_bardo · 2026-09-11
- Investment Analyst Asks How to Build a Claude-Based Diligence Agent Stack — Careless_Tie2286 · 2026-09-11