Stop Paying the Opus Tax

Originally published in

Except in one important metric: price. Sonnet 5 is $2/$10 per Mtok vs $5/$25 on Opus.

In other words, the gap you're paying extra for just got thin. There's not much air now between Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8.

"Just use the best model" stopped being rational

Thus far you've probably decided that benchmarking models every two days is counter-productive and that you can move a lot faster by just choosing one model and focusing on your output. It's not a dumb approach.

However, at scale this approach will cost you millions. Every task you send to the frontier model out of habit is now paying the Opus Tax.

It's time to start being a little more selective. Opus 4.8 still wins at higher-effort tasks (it may even be more cost-effective there) according to backend. Relatively simple stuff. Here was our decision:

Axis	Score	Rationale
Scope	2	No cross-cutting
Novelty	1	Patterns already well established in repo
Risk	2	New tables, but additive and easily rolled back
Iteration	2	A few cycles of review expected
Total	7	Model tier: Sonnet

Note the bump rule never fired here. If that same form had needed a destructive migration on production data, Risk goes to 3 and the whole task bumps up a tier, regardless of the total.

The over-thinking complaint is a context lesson in disguise

Sonnet 5 over-thinks smaller tasks: thinking longer, using more tokens and generally doing more work than is asked for, or necessary. In the aggregate, this will eat into your productivity and cost effectiveness significantly.

The lesson is that we need to be systematically more selective with our models. Scoping tasks ahead of prompt execution is part of cost control, and therefore part of context engineering.

Effort is now a parameter, set with words.

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