Developer finds Claude effort setting, not model choice, drove most of a week's quota burn

A developer exhausted a full week of Claude Ultra quota in three days and initially blamed the model. Benchmarking Opus across effort levels on a routing task showed that costs rose sharply past medium effort, with no gain in correctness. Testing the cheapest model, Haiku, on a regex-engine task matched Python's re on 3,000 patterns, and routine well-specified tasks cost far less on low effort. The author concludes that low effort is safe when outputs can be verified by automated checks, though findings are based on small samples and some runs were excluded. The author also released a free, open-source Claude Code skill that selects models and effort per step and runs only the tests affected by a change.
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