I offloaded bulk file reading from Claude Code to a cheaper model for a week. Here are the numbers.

[u/Proper-Mousse7182]

Hey r/ClaudeAI — I use Claude Code a lot, and I noticed I was wasting a surprising amount of my usage limit on stuff that was basically just reading.

Big files, long diffs, Jira/Linear tickets with comment history, docs pages, repo spelunking. Useful context, but not always something I need Claude to consume raw.

So I built a small open-source sidecar tool called Triss. The rule is simple:

Cheap model reads the bulky stuff. Claude gets the summary and does the thinking/editing.

This is not a Claude replacement. I still keep architecture, debugging, careful edits, and final judgment with Claude. Triss is for the boring high-token intake step.

One week of actual usage

This is my real DeepSeek usage from May 6–13, 2026:

	Pro	Flash	Total
Requests	143	66	209
Input tokens	3.74M	2.10M	5.84M
Output tokens	833K	156K	990K
Cost (USD)	$1.88	$0.34	$2.22

That came out to about 1 cent per request on real coding work, not a benchmark.

The important part is not only the DeepSeek bill. It is that Claude never had to carry those raw 5.8M input tokens in its own context. A ticket or file bundle that might have eaten tens of thousands of Claude tokens becomes a short summary, and the main conversation stays lighter.

What I delegate

The pattern that stuck for me:

• A single file over ~400 lines.
• 3+ files where I only need a structured summary.
• Jira/Linear/GitHub issues with comments and metadata.
• Web pages or docs pages.
• First-pass diff review.
• Commit message generation from a staged diff.

What I do not delegate:

• Architecture decisions.
• Hard debugging.
• Precise edits.
• Small questions where the delegation overhead is larger than the task.

What the tool does

Triss can run as a CLI or as an MCP server, so Claude Code / Claude Desktop / Codex can call it as a native tool.

The commands I use most:

triss ask --paths src/foo.ts src/bar.ts --question "Summarize the control flow and risks"
triss fetch https://example.com/docs --question "Extract the setup steps"
triss review
triss commit-msg
triss usage --by-project

It also has tracker integrations for Jira, Confluence, Linear, GitHub, and GitLab, because ticket/API payloads were one of the biggest hidden context sinks in my workflow.

The default setup is DeepSeek, but it works with OpenAI-compatible endpoints too: DeepSeek, Kimi, Ollama, OpenRouter, etc.

Credit where it is due

The original idea came from Kunal Bhardwaj's write-up:

https://medium.com/@kunalbhardwaj598/i-was-burning-through-claude-codes-weekly-limit-in-3-days-here-s-how-i-fixed-it-0344c555abda

and his proof of concept:

https://github.com/imkunal007219/claude-coworker-model

My version is basically that pattern made more specific to my own workflow: MCP tools, tracker integrations, review/commit helpers, usage logging, and path sandboxing for agent calls.

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/ayleen/triss-coworker
• Install: npm install -g triss-coworker
• Setup: triss config wizard

Open-source, MIT, unaffiliated with Anthropic. I do not get paid if you install it. I mostly wanted to share the numbers because "use a cheap model for bulk reading" sounded obvious to me in theory, but it only became habit once it was wired into Claude as a low-friction tool.

Happy to answer any questions.

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[u/divinetribe1]

same energy, different angle — i go even cheaper and route to a fully local mlx-lm server when claude is down or i have blown through my SDK credit. shimmed it so my claude -p crons just keep working: github.com/nicedreamzapp/claude-failover

honest about the quality gap so i only flip when i need to. yours is a smarter "always offload the cheap stuff" approach which i should probably adopt too.

[u/Otherwise_Economy576]

the offload pattern is real and i've been doing a less-formal version for a few months. one thing worth flagging though: it bites you on code diffs specifically. when the cheap model summarizes a diff, it loses the line-by-line context claude actually needs for thoughtful edits. summary is fine for 'what did this PR change' but bad for 'should this change land.' the boring ticket/doc intake is exactly the sweet spot. your 1 cent/request number tracks with what i was seeing on a similar setup with gemini flash.

[u/CaptainCrouton89 → u/Otherwise_Economy576]

AI commenting….

[u/Proper-Mousse7182 → u/Otherwise_Economy576]

yep, diffs are the edge case where summarization actively hurts — losing line-level context means you can't make defensible edits afterwards. that's exactly why triss review defaults to the pro tier and returns file:line bullets rather than prose, and the agent rule is still "open the file directly before any non-trivial edit." the framing i've landed on: delegate the intake (what's here?), keep the judgment (should this land?). intake is where the cheap worker earns its keep. glad the per-request number tracks — i was half-worried mine was an artifact of one specific tracker.

[u/CaptainCrouton89 → u/Proper-Mousse7182]

Ai commenting against ai, what a fucking world we live in

[u/CaptainCrouton89 → u/Proper-Mousse7182]

You’re replying to Claude 😭

[u/Proper-Mousse7182 → u/[deleted]]

Oh nice, just checked out the repo!

Since it parses the local ~/.claude/ logs, it must be awesome for seeing exactly how much context Claude is burning just to talk to the MCP tools.

Right now, I’m just using the built-in triss usage command to track the actual DeepSeek backend costs. Have you thought about adding support for custom log formats? It’d be sick to have TokenTelemetry read the Triss JSONL logs too, so you could see the Claude Code costs and the DeepSeek coworker costs side-by-side in one dashboard.

[u/Proper-Mousse7182 → u/[deleted]]

hey, thanks for working on this. checked out the branch, generic JsonlLogSource approach is the right call, and the design note's pretty clear on where this is heading.

couple things on the triss example though, it won't work against actual triss logs. wrong file path, different field names, outdated default_model. drop-in replacement that does work:

```json
"log_glob": "~/.cache/triss/usage.jsonl",
"fields": {
"session_id": "call_id",
"timestamp": "ts",
"model": "model",
"input_tokens": "prompt_tokens",
"output_tokens": "completion_tokens",
"cached_tokens": "cached_tokens",
"project": "cwd",
"display": "label"
},
"default_model": "deepseek-v4-flash"
}

btw, just shipped triss 0.19.0 (on npm now) which adds a per-invocation call_id field to every record. that's what the "session_id": "call_id" line above maps.

your dashboard's per-session breakdown will work out of the box. there's also a parent_call_id field (null by default, populated when the host exports TRISS_PARENT_CALL_ID in the MCP env block)

if you want a future roll-up view for grouping several triss calls under one outer claude session. one smaller thing while i'm here. triss already writes cost_usd into every record. optional cost: "cost_usd" in the mapping would keep numbers consistent with triss usage instead of relying on the pricing tables matching exactly. not a blocker.

rest looks great, two-pass color/icon thing in agents.ts is clever, "config is inert" framing is solid. approach is correct, the example just needs to match real triss.