TIL the best automations reduce context window by using cheap models for boring steps and saving Claude Opus for the hard part

I learned this the annoying way: I inspected a support-ticket automation that was doing cleanup, classification, extraction, summarization, and escalation decisions with the same expensive model. It worked. That was the problem.

Source: [Dev.to](https://dev.to/lars_winstand/til-the-best-automations-reduce-context-window-by-using-cheap-models-for-boring-steps-and-saving-58md)