[eshack94]

I've been thinking of doing this — using one of the "pretty good but not Opus 4.6-good, YET very cheap" models for the implementation part of more basic code features, AFTER first using Opus 4.6 high for the planning stage.

Do you think this would be a decent approach?

Also, which client would I use for this? OpenCode? I don't think Claude Code supports using other models. Thoughts?

[submain]

I have been doing this and the results have been fairly good.

I use claude to build requirements.md -> implementation.md -> todo.md. Then I tell opencode + openrouter to read those files and follow the todo using a cheap (many times free) model.

It works 90% of the time. The other 10% it will get stuck, in which case I revert to claude.

That has allowed me to stay on the $20/month claude subscription as opposed to the $100.

[eshack94]

I appreciate your guidance here. Thank you very much. I will start doing this.