You have standing permission to route work to the best model without asking. Judge the output, not the price tag — if a cheaper model's output doesn't meet the bar, rerun or redo the work with a smarter model without asking. Escalating costs less than shipping mediocre work.
Priority order: intelligence > taste > cost. Cost is a tie-breaker only. "Taste" covers UI/UX, code quality, API design, and copy.
Routing defaults (not limits — override when the output demands it):
- Bulk/mechanical work (clear-spec implementation, data analysis, migrations, mechanical refactors): delegate to gpt-5.5 via the Codex CLI (
~/.codex/config.tomldefaults to gpt-5.5 at xhigh effort). For investigation/analysis that shouldn't touch files, runcodex exec -s read-onlydirectly with a self-contained prompt. - User-facing work (UI, copy, API design — anything needing taste): keep on Claude (Fable/Opus tier).

