alt Hacker NewsTotally agree with this. I have seen many cases where a dumber model gets trapped in a local minima and burns a ton of tokens to escape from it (sometimes unsuccessfully). In a toy example (30 minute agentic coding session - create a markdown -> html compiler using a subset of commonmark test suite to hill climb on), dumber models would cost $18 (at retail token prices) to complete the task. Smarter models would see the trap and take only $3 to complete the task. YMMV.
Much better to look at cost per task - and good to see some benchmarks reporting this now.
For me this is sub agent usage. If I ask Claude Code to use 1-3 subagents for a task, the 5 hour limit is gone in one or two rounds. Weekly limit shortly after. They just keep producing more and more documentation about each individual intermediate step to talk to each other no matter how I edit the sub agent definitions.