I nerfed our coding agents on purpose

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External ID

48419614

Source

HN

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Launched

June 5, 2026

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Upvotes

27

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0.7814207650273224

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Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Tl;dr: I trained a classifier to route to the least expensive model and reasoning depth to complete the request. Coupling that with additional automated token efficiency techniques has yielded 3x usage for the same spend. For anyone interested in trying it themselves: https://nerfguard.comVarious teammates and I switched over to Codex from Claude Code recently. We still bounce between the tools, but Codex’s speed and steerability coupled with performance gains were hard to ignore. One of the downsides was that the per token pricing kicked in way sooner. This is happening across the board, but we felt it in Codex more acutely. We’re a startup filled with people who work around the clock and are obsessed with building — naturally our daily bill alone was striking.Luckily we’re going after a big mission and speed matters significantly more than marginal token spend on the edges. Still, it got us thinking about how it was ludicrous that while our product has a side effect of decreasing token spend and speeding up agentic workflows by many orders of magnitude, we were using these top tier models for all types of internal coding tasks without any of those optimizations. The waste felt pretty ridiculous — the most glaring culprit was that we were seemingly using the max intelligence model on max reasoning for every task even when the task clearly didn’t require it. As a company who spends a lot of time on cached intelligence, it was also easy for us to see how there was plenty of other low hanging fruit as well.So, on a recent weekend, I quickly built a tool to optimize our usage. At its core is a very fast classifier that classifies your requests to the least intelligence required for the task and includes some nice token optimizations on top. The result is roughly the same quality for multiples lower token spend. But even more exciting for us, is that the properly bin packed intelligence and reasoning levels meant our speed also went up considerably. This wasn’t negligible.We’ve observed up to 3x savings and hours per day per person in saved time that we would have otherwise been waiting on tool turns and coding agent responses.For us, that means improved engineering velocity and significantly higher usage for the same spend. It also means more usage before getting throttled.As I told friends about this, they also wanted to start using it to maximize the usage they could get out of their coding agent plans. There are now engineers across many of the most cutting edge AI companies using this tool to optimize their token utilization in this way. Not just to save money, but to maximize output. Turns out that the best way to avoid getting nerfed by Claude is to intentionally nerf yourself selectively. We decided to release it for the rest of the builder community to use as well. You can now turn on Nerfguard for yourself and start getting more usage today.

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