model-economy

model-economy is a skill for Claude Code from orenluxy/fable-method. It costs 70 tokens per session (544 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for assigning each part of a coding workflow to an appropriate model. It recommends cheaper models for mechanical investigation or bulk work and the main model for decisions requiring judgment.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when planning multi-step work, delegating codebase scans, summarising changes, performing bulk transformations, or choosing models for different tasks.
Why use it?
It helps control token and model costs without handing complex decisions to a model that lacks the needed context.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the fable-method plugin — 8 skills, 2 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when planning multi-step work, delegating codebase scans, summarising changes, performing…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/orenluxy/fable-method/model-economy
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 orenluxy/fable-method --skill model-economy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/orenluxy/fable-method

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install fable-method, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 2 agents, 3 hooks.

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-economy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orenluxy/fable-method/model-economy.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/orenluxy/fable-method/model-economy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/orenluxy/fable-method/model-economy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/orenluxy/fable-method/model-economy.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 544 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.
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 $0.00070 $0.00544
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.00272
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00109
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00054

Measured 6d ago against content hash 7471af1f3db5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

model-economy 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 6d 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/model-economy/SKILL.md · 27 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 27 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Model Economy

Principle: a standing instruction like "use the cheapest model" does nothing by itself — the main session model cannot swap itself. The ONLY mechanism for per-step model choice is delegation to subagents with an explicit model: field. Cost savings happen when mechanical work is pushed down and judgment work stays up.

Delegation table

Step type Route to Why
Territory scanning: codebase exploration, convention extraction, web fact-finding territory-scout (haiku) Wide, read-only, mechanical. Findings > prose.
Change inventory, diff summarization, test-run reporting report-builder (sonnet) Mechanical but needs accurate code reading.
Bulk transformations with a clear spec (renames, format conversions, boilerplate) subagent on haiku/sonnet, spec written by main model Spec quality is the judgment; execution is mechanical.
Architecture decisions, interviews, quiz design, deviation calls, anything user-facing main model, no delegation Judgment and full context required. Delegating this is false economy.
Prototype variations (prototype-first) main model Taste extraction IS the point; cheap models produce generic variations that waste the pass.

Rules

  1. Never delegate judgment to save tokens. A wrong architectural call costs more than every scan in the project combined. Cheap models get facts-gathering, not decisions.
  2. Write the brief before delegating. A subagent with a vague brief returns noise you'll re-do on the expensive model — negative savings. One paragraph: what to look for, where, output format.
  3. One round-trip. If a subagent's output needs a second clarification round, absorb the task into the main model instead — the coordination overhead has eaten the savings.
  4. Report the routing. When you delegate, tell the user in one line: "scanning via territory-scout (haiku) to keep main context lean." This keeps the economy auditable.
  5. If the environment has no subagent support (e.g., claude.ai), state that model routing is unavailable and proceed on the current model — do not pretend to route.

Read the full file on GitHub · 27 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. 6d ago First seen · 27 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 7471af1f3db5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

model-economy is a skill published in the GitHub repository orenluxy/fable-method (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 544 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.