cost

A planning command that chooses how to divide a coding task among models with different costs and reasoning abilities.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan delegation for a task, select suitable subagents, and reduce model cost without dropping necessary checks.
Why use it?
It helps avoid spending expensive model time on routine work such as test runs, formatting, searches, and log review while preserving deeper reasoning for architecture or difficult debugging.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/dshakes/compass/cost
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dshakes/compass
Per session 12 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 190 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00012 $0.00190
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.00095
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00038
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00019

Measured 2d ago against content hash b35bd965a342, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cost scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

claude/commands/cost.md · 18 lines

What it actually says

Look at what we're about to do${ARGUMENTS:+: $ARGUMENTS} and propose the cheapest correct execution plan.

  • Which parts are mechanical or parallel and should go to Haiku subagents (test runs, formatting, log triage, broad code searches, repetitive edits)?
  • Which parts are standard coding/refactoring that fit a Sonnet subagent?
  • Which parts genuinely need Opus-level reasoning in the driver (architecture, security, subtle debugging)?
  • Where am I about to re-read files or re-run searches I could delegate once and keep only the conclusion?

Give me the delegation plan as a short table (task → model/subagent → why), then proceed with it once I'm happy.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 18 lines · 12 tokens per session scan A b35bd965a342

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cost is a command published in the GitHub repository dshakes/compass (19 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 12 tokens to every session and 190 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.