model economy

The budget discipline behind the model ladder: every delegated call names an explicit model, and the top tier has to be justified rather than defaulted. Fan-outs multiply spend by the number of agents — defaulting them all to the expensive model burns budget with no quality gain on bounded work.

One session can fan out to dozens of agents; whatever each one costs gets multiplied by that number. Making the model an explicit choice per call — instead of an inherited default — is the difference between a controlled spend and a leak.

Verify panels and finder legs usually drop a tier below the author stage. Mechanical legs drop to free-local. The expensive model's time goes where reasoning is genuinely hard: cross-cutting architecture, ambiguous synthesis, final judgment.

The whole method is downloadable and adaptable — rules/model-economy.md inside the zip.