Comment by Aurornis
13 hours ago
Some of the newer models available on OpenRouter are good, but I agree that none of them are a replacement for Opus 4.6 for coding.
If you're trying to minimize cost then having one of the inexpensive models do exploratory work and simple tasks while going back to Opus for the serious thinking and review is a good hybrid model. Having the $20/month Claude plan available is a good idea even if you're primarily using OpenRouter available models.
I think trying to use anything other than the best available SOTA model for important work is not a good tradeoff, though.
I've been thinking of doing this — using one of the "pretty good but not Opus 4.6-good, YET very cheap" models for the implementation part of more basic code features, AFTER first using Opus 4.6 high for the planning stage.
Do you think this would be a decent approach?
Also, which client would I use for this? OpenCode? I don't think Claude Code supports using other models. Thoughts?
I have been doing this and the results have been fairly good.
I use claude to build requirements.md -> implementation.md -> todo.md. Then I tell opencode + openrouter to read those files and follow the todo using a cheap (many times free) model.
It works 90% of the time. The other 10% it will get stuck, in which case I revert to claude.
That has allowed me to stay on the $20/month claude subscription as opposed to the $100.