It cuts token usage because they are using a different service with a different token budget for the reader/code writer tasks.
You can also just delegate this to subagents with Claude Code (though you have a more limited choice of models unless you swap the cheaper models via OpenRouter).
I'm OK using a dumb model as a smart grep, but the whole point of using the frontier models is using their intelligence for the hard stuff like coding.
Isn't this a somewhat standard multi-model setup? there's nothing ground breaking here, just delegate claude to plan -> smaller model for implementation.
You can also just delegate this to subagents with Claude Code (though you have a more limited choice of models unless you swap the cheaper models via OpenRouter).
I'm OK using a dumb model as a smart grep, but the whole point of using the frontier models is using their intelligence for the hard stuff like coding.
I've never had an issue with Codex or Claude reading massive files, they're really good at precise greps.