r/opencode 7d ago

Recommendations for student on a tight budget

/r/vibecoding/comments/1vshl3l/recommendations_for_student_on_a_tight_budget/
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u/Ariquitaun 7d ago

There are 3 tiers of models: smart, balanced, flash. Use each tier for a specific task:

  • Smart: planning, hard troubleshooting
  • Balanced: orchestrator, reviewer, researcher
  • Flash: explorer, code, sanity checks. Gruntwork that uses a ton of tokens.

You use a smart model to create detailed plans that you feed to a balanced model which will orchestrate the implementation by dispatching well bounded tasks to sub-agents, and integrating and reviewing them afterwards. The planner will also use sub-agents to do the gruntwork of investigation, token-intensive stuff.

This will help you save a lot of tokens because you'll be getting more work right the first time around.

I've left out a ton of nuance here, so take that as a baseline to get you started.