Yesterday I wrote a commit message with Claude Code. The diff was a one-line change: a typo in a comment. Claude Opus read the diff, thought for two seconds, and generated fix: correct typo in auth comment . That consumed about 800 input tokens and 30 output tokens, at $15 and $75 per million respectively. Cost: a fraction of a cent. But multiply that by 40 commits per day, 250 days per year, across a company with 200 developers using coding agents, and the fraction of a cent becomes thousands of dollars spent on the intellectual equivalent of applying band-aids. The problem isn't that Opus is expensive. The problem is that coding agents don't distinguish between $0.001 tasks and $0.10 tasks. Everything goes through the same model. Generate a commit message, classify an issue, validate a format -- everything hits the big model at the same cost as designing a microservices architecture. It's the equivalent of hiring a surgeon to apply band-aids.…