Cherny: Frontier models are often cheaper overall because they require fewer corrections
Boris Cherny · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · Feb 19, 2026 · at 1:09:26
Boris Cherny, creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, explains best practices and token economics for developers using AI coding tools.
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“The thing that happens is sometimes people try to use a less expensive model like Sonnet or something like this, but because it's less intelligent, it actually takes more tokens in the end to do the same task. And so it's actually not obvious that it's cheaper if you use a less expensive model. Often it's actually cheaper and less token intensive if you use the most capable model, because it can just do the same thing much faster with less correction, less less handholding and so on.”
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