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

Description and use

<p>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.</p> <p>It worked.</p> <p>That was the problem.</p> <p>When a workflow works, nobody asks whether it’s wasting money and context on glorified janitor tasks.</p> <p>And most automations absolutely are.</p> <p>If you’re building with n8n, Make, Zapier, LangChain, OpenClaw, or plain API calls, the highest-leverage optimization usually isn’t a better prompt.</p> <p>It’s this:</p> <ul> <li>use cheap, fas

Problem

<p>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.</p> <p>It worked.</p> <p>That was the problem.</p> <p>When a workflow works, nobody asks whether it’s wasting money and context on glorified janitor tasks.</p> <p>And most automations absolutely are.</p> <p>If you’re building with n8n, Make, Zapier, LangChain, OpenClaw, or plain API calls, the highest-leverage optimization usually isn’t a better prompt.</p> <p>It’s this:</p> <ul> <li>use cheap, fas

Outcome

<p>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.</p> <p>It worked.</p> <p>That was the problem.</p> <p>When a workflow works, nobody asks whether it’s wasting money and context on glorified janitor tasks.</p> <p>And most automations absolutely are.</p> <p>If you’re building with n8n, Make, Zapier, LangChain, OpenClaw, or plain API calls, the highest-leverage optimization usually isn’t a better prompt.</p> <p>It’s this:</p> <ul> <li>use cheap, fas

Evidence

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

Source