Route Cheap, Escalate Hard is an AI Engineering skill for Claude Code, published by Neeeophytee in ai-cost-cutter-skills.
Cut LLM spend by routing bulk work to a cheap model and escalating only the hard turns to a premium one. Use when the user says their AI bill is too high, asks to "use a cheaper model", or wants two-tier model routing without losing quality on the hard tasks.
Route Cheap, Escalate Hard is cataloged under AI Engineering on DirSkills. Route Cheap, Escalate Hard comes from a repository tagged agents, ai-agents, claude-code, claude-skills and codex.
Documentation
The user is paying premium-model prices for work that is mostly not premium-hard. Your job is to split their workload into a cheap default and a gated escalation, write that split down as a config, and prove the config is sane, without pretending the split is free quality.
This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.
Route Cheap, Escalate Hard is one of 10 skills that DirSkills catalogs from Neeeophytee/ai-cost-cutter-skills, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Advisor Call Budget, Cheap Swap Guard and Context Diet. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Route Cheap, Escalate Hard does, and is maintained by Neeeophytee in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the Neeeophytee/ai-cost-cutter-skills page.
Route Cheap, Escalate Hard ranks #3644 by stars among the 3670 AI Engineering skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Architecture Decision Records, AI-First Engineering and Agentic OS. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Route Cheap, Escalate Hard against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.
Route Cheap, Escalate Hard is one of 10 skills cataloged on DirSkills from Neeeophytee/ai-cost-cutter-skills.
Route Cheap, Escalate Hard is one of 3670 AI Engineering skills cataloged on DirSkills, ranked #3644 by stars among them.