route-by-cost

route-by-cost is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Tarekkharsa/agentstack. It costs 51 tokens per session (453 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A model-selection guide for workflows that use several AI models or agents. It matches routine work, exploration, difficult implementation, and final review with models suited to those jobs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when delegating coding, repository exploration, fact-checking, design, API work, orchestration, or final review across models.
Why use it?
It helps control cost and time by avoiding the use of the most expensive model for work a cheaper model can handle.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/tarekkharsa/agentstack/route-by-cost
Any agent
npx skills add Tarekkharsa/agentstack --skill route-by-cost
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Tarekkharsa/agentstack

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 route-by-cost

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tarekkharsa/agentstack/route-by-cost.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tarekkharsa/agentstack/route-by-cost)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tarekkharsa/agentstack/route-by-cost"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tarekkharsa/agentstack/route-by-cost.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 51 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 453 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 $0.00051 $0.00453
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00227
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00091
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00045

Measured 5d ago against content hash c092d1445532, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

route-by-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 5d 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.

crates/cli/catalog/skills/route-by-cost/SKILL.md · 44 lines

What it actually says

Route by cost

Use when orchestrating work across models (subagents, workflow steps, delegation): decide which model does which job, instead of running everything on the most expensive one.

The heuristic

Match each job to the cheapest model that clears the bar:

Job Route to
Clear-spec implementation, codemods, migrations, data/log analysis cheapest capable model (a bulk model / Codex)
Repo exploration, readers, fact-checks, wiring/config verification a small fast model
Tricky refactors, user-facing code, UI, copy, API design a strong model
Orchestration, synthesis across agents, final review, hard judgment your best model, used sparingly

Principles

  • Spend the scarce (best) model on judgment, not labor. Its jobs: decide, synthesize, review, and the genuinely hard or taste-critical work. Everything else delegates down.
  • If you can fully specify the task, it doesn't need the best model. Write the spec, hand it to a cheaper one.
  • Generate cheap, verify smart. A cheap model produces the diff; a strong model reviews it — reviewing costs a fraction of generating.
  • Escalate on quality, not price. If a cheap model's output misses the bar, rerun with a stronger one — don't ship mediocre to save cost. Cost is a tie-breaker, not the goal.
  • Anything user-facing (UI, copy, API shape) must meet the taste bar — don't cheap out there.

Subagents & workflows

  • Don't let subagents or workflow steps silently inherit the orchestrator's model — pass a model explicitly per job.
  • For parallel editing agents, isolate them (separate git worktrees) so their edits don't collide.
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. 5d ago First seen · 44 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A c092d1445532

Subscribe to this mod's changes

route-by-cost is a skill published in the GitHub repository Tarekkharsa/agentstack (3 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 453 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.

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