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Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90% | Spotify Engineering

engineering.atspotify.com · 1,564 words · saved by 1 readers

Most of what an AI coding agent does for me isn't thinking. It's I/O.

Most of what an AI coding agent does for me isn't thinking. It's I/O. Reading five files to answer a question about one method. Generating a test file that follows the exact same pattern as the twenty test files next to it. Updating docs after a meeting. Thousands of tokens gone and almost zero reasoning. The seat license isn't what hurts, it's the tokens. And you're feeding all of it to a frontier model that's wildly overqualified. What if you could route the grunt work to something cheaper that handles it just as well, and save the expensive model for the problems that actually need it?…

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