model-selection

model-selection is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from nimadorostkar/Claude-Skills-collection. It costs 41 tokens per session (1,235 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to choosing a language model for a specific task by measuring its accuracy, cost, and response time. It also covers routing work between models and interpreting benchmarks carefully.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when selecting a model, evaluating a replacement, estimating production cost and latency, or designing escalation between models.
Why use it?
It prevents using an unnecessarily expensive or slow model when a cheaper one meets the task’s requirements.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit Use it when selecting a model, evaluating a replacement, estimating production cost and latency, or designing escalation between models.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nimadorostkar/claude-skills-collection/model-selection
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.

Any agent
npx skills add nimadorostkar/Claude-Skills-collection --skill model-selection
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nimadorostkar/Claude-Skills-collection

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for model-selection

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nimadorostkar/claude-skills-collection/model-selection/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nimadorostkar/claude-skills-collection/model-selection)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nimadorostkar/claude-skills-collection/model-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nimadorostkar/claude-skills-collection/model-selection/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for model-selection

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nimadorostkar/claude-skills-collection/model-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nimadorostkar/claude-skills-collection/model-selection.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,235 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00041 $0.01235
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00617
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00247
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00123

Measured 11d ago against content hash 13fdbc06c895, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

model-selection 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 11d 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.

skills/ai/model-selection/SKILL.md · 116 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Model Selection

Purpose

Choose the model that meets the task's requirements at the lowest cost and latency. Most production LLM features run on a model several times more expensive than the task requires, because nobody measured the cheaper one.

When to Use

  • Choosing a model for a new feature.
  • Reducing the cost or latency of an existing feature.
  • Evaluating whether a newly released model is worth migrating to.
  • Designing a routing strategy across several models.

Capabilities

  • Task-to-capability matching.
  • Cost and latency modeling at real volume.
  • Routing: cheap model first, escalate on difficulty.
  • Benchmark interpretation and its limits.
  • Migration and re-evaluation.

Inputs

  • The task, and the accuracy it genuinely requires.
  • Volume, latency budget, and cost budget.
  • An evaluation set — without one, this is guesswork.

Outputs

  • A model choice justified by measurement on your data.
  • A cost and latency projection at real volume.
  • A routing strategy, where one is warranted.

Workflow

  1. Start with the cheapest plausible model — Not the best one. Measure it on your evaluation set. Escalate only if it fails, and only as far as necessary.
  2. Measure on your data, not on benchmarks — A model that leads on MMLU may be worse at your specific extraction task. Public benchmarks measure general capability, and your task is not general.
  3. Model the cost at real volume — A per-call cost difference that looks trivial becomes the dominant line item at a million calls a month. Do the arithmetic before choosing.
  4. Consider routing — Send everything to a small model; escalate the cases it flags as low-confidence to a larger one. This frequently captures most of the accuracy at a fraction of the cost.
  5. Re-evaluate on model updates — Provider models change under the same name. A prompt tuned six months ago on a model that has since been updated may no longer be optimal.

Best Practices

  • The most common mistake is defaulting to the most capable model for everything. Classification, extraction, and routing tasks are usually solved by a small model at a tenth of the cost and a fifth of the latency.
  • Public benchmarks are contaminated and gamed. They are a rough capability ordering, not a prediction of performance on your task.
  • Latency matters more than cost for user-facing features, and cost matters more than latency for batch processing. Optimize for the one that binds.
  • A cheaper model with better prompting often beats a more expensive model with worse prompting. Improve the prompt before upgrading the model.
  • Test the failure mode, not just the accuracy. A small model that fails loudly is safer than a large one that fails plausibly.
  • Do not hard-code the model name across the codebase. Configure it, so migration is a config change rather than a search-and-replace.

Read the full file on GitHub · 116 lines

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. 11d ago First seen · 116 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 13fdbc06c895

Subscribe to this mod's changes

model-selection is a skill published in the GitHub repository nimadorostkar/Claude-Skills-collection (26 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 1,235 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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