Made Astra the principal dev and DeepSeek its team. 63% fewer tokens

I have been working with AI coding tools for a really long time (Aug 2024 , the copy pasting era lol) and alwaya have loved the frontier models and their ability to think about problem and then provide options , overall the thinking and planning ability of GPT-6 Astra is something that no other model can tops But From the start of Agentic Era I kept hitting my Frontier Model limit, and most of it was going on typing: reading files, writing boilerplate, re-running tests , something that very cheap model can do very well as well but never got time to make this Framework/workflow properly So I built Cheap Agent, an MCP server and plugin for Codex (and Claude Code). What it does Astra plans and writes a short task. A cheap model (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash via OpenRouter, about half a cent a task) writes the code in a git worktree. It has to write a test that fails before the fix and passes after. Cheap Agent runs that test itself. Only passing work lands, uncommitted, so you review the diff as usual. If the cheap model gets stuck, Astra finishes the step itself. Numbers (SWE-bench Verified): Adding a feature: 154k → 57k Opus/Astra tokens, 63% less 7 everyday bug fixes: 59% less, 7/7 solved by both 9 of the hardest bugs: 55% less, but 6/9 solved vs 7/9 It doesn’t help on tiny jobs, because Astra is already quick there. Why I made it I’ve met a lot of students who want the best model and can’t afford $200 a month. The aim is to stretch the plan you already pay for. How It Was build : in Claude Code. Opus and Astra designed it, then I used Cheap Agent to build Cheap Agent (sounds funny lol) . The Windows port was 30 delegated jobs for $0.29 of DeepSeek. cheap models are fine at typing as long as the task is tight, but never trust one that says “tests pass”, so Cheap Agent runs the tests itself. And the savings depend on your repo having a test command: my first demo take only saved 20% because I forgot a package.json, so the big model ended up running the tests itself. Free Forever: it’s open source (MIT) and free. The cheap model runs on your own API key, and a few dollars lasts hundreds of tasks. Your code goes to the provider you pick, and only after you allow it per project. npx cheap-agent then codex plugin marketplace add muaaz9329/cheap-ag · github.com/muaaz9329/cheap-ag would really love your guys feedback and how can I improve this , better yet could have contributions from Awesome community here on what people might need Hope everyone have great Tuesday !