How We Cut AI Coding Costs from $10K to $3K/Month with Task-Level Model Routing

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Every AI coding tool sells you on the frontier model. Claude Code defaults to Fable 5. Codex pushes Sol. Cursor uses whatever's newest.

But here's what six months of running production AI workloads taught me: 65% of your AI coding calls don't need a frontier model.

Tests? Boilerplate? Documentation? File scaffolding? You're burning $50/Mtok output tokens on work that a $3/Mtok model handles identically.

Last quarter we spent $10,400/month across Claude Code, Codex, and API calls. After implementing task-level routing, we're at $3,100. Same output quality. Same velocity. Here's exactly how.