The Money Problem
Everyone treats AI cost as a money problem. Spend less, pick a cheaper plan, watch the meter. I solved the money part years ago, the boring way: I have been using the cloud, and paranoid about runaway bills, since the early days of AWS, ~2006, so I cap hard, a ceiling a few dollars above my usage limit, and a runaway charge just can’t happen. Money is not where this bites.
Where it bit me was a deadline, and what made it a deadline was that I had to close the laptop and go. Real life, somewhere to be, and the work wasn’t done. Normally you hand it off and let it keep running, but I couldn’t: my Claude usage was spent, and dumping the rest to a web agent that would grind away without me either wasn’t wired up yet or didn’t exist. So the work stopped when I did.
Both halves of that were avoidable. I’d burned the Claude allowance running an expensive model on work that never needed it, out of habit or inattention, so there was nothing left when it counted. And I’d run everything through one provider when I could have been farming sub-jobs out to Codex, local and web, and to Gemini. All my eggs in one basket, with one provider’s cap and one closing laptop between me and done.
None of that is a spending problem. You do not fix it by spending less. It is a routing problem.
Routing is which model handles which task (cheap and fast for the triage, premium for the part that needs it), which provider gets which job so no single cap can strand you, and what can keep running after you close the laptop. It is deciding, before the work runs, where it should go. That is infrastructure, rules applied automatically, not a call you make tired at 11pm with the clock running.
Right now I do most of it by hand. I built a launch skill that spreads work across tools, and it helps, but it is still me deciding what goes where, every time. Nothing reaches for the cheaper model or the idle provider on its own when I hit a wall. I do, if I remember, if I have the time.
I never ran out of money. I ran out of the right model at the wrong time, and that is a routing problem, not a spending one.