alt Hacker News> Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.
I don't have a dog in this fight but is this actually true? If you're using Claude Code they can know that whatever client-side model selection they put into it is active. So if they can get away with routing 80% of the requests to Haiku and only route to Opus for the requests that really need it, that does give them a cost model where they can rely on lower costs than if a third-party client just routes to Opus for everything. Even if they aren't doing that sort of thing now, it would be understandable if they wanted to.
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That’s not how Claude Code works. It’s not like a web chatbot with a layer that routes based on complexity of request.
It (CC) does have a /models command, you can still decide to route everything to Opus if you just want to burn tokens I guess it's not default so most wouldn't, but still, people willing to go to a third party client are more likely that kind of power user anyway
They still have the total consumption under their control (*bar prompt caching and other specific optimizations) where in the past they even had different quotas per model, it shouldn't cost them more money, just be a worse/different service I guess