Cut orchestration cost 77%: the planner never writes code

Goal: Make my expensive model orchestrate only, with cheap workers doing all edits.
Setup: agents used in source: Claude, Codex.
Steps:
1. Let the orchestrator read, plan, delegate and review; refuse every write or shell call it tries.
2. Only workers touch files (local Qwen 3.8 27B in the source).
3. Measure cost and time per task (77% cheaper; 43 min vs under 7).
4. Variant: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash workers cut Astra usage by 98% in another setup.
Rules: ask me before anything irreversible (sending, posting, paying, deleting); don’t invent data, results or tools I haven’t given you; tell me what you couldn’t verify.
Based on: /u/GapNew4766 — https://www.reddit.com/r/AI_Agents/comments/1wtrix3/gpt61_sol_is_cheap_we_made_it_77_cheaper_by_never/

Steps are from the source. Includes a “Based on” credit line.