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

engineering.atspotify.com

101–110 of 153 posts

Re: Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%

#101
No mention of correctness or task success rate. This only works if the subagent model is much cheaper than the one running your session, which means it will probably be mistaken a lot more often [1] about what the code does. Routing purely on size tells you nothing about code complexity.

On top of that, saving 90% of input tokens != saving 90% "of tokens", output is wildly more expensive.

[1] especially if it's a really old model like Gemini 2.5!

Re: Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%

#102

It takes true corporate dedication to publish technical thought leadership on a page that actively fights your ability to read it.

"The seat license isn't what hurts, it's the tokens."

not X, but Y... so this is very likely Opus 5 text, given timing and how it reads. has all the marks of it, one being very weird wording which makes it so hard to read the text.

Re: Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%

#105
The Bloom filter framing is right. What made it work for me: the cheap model is only allowed to point, never to decide. Once it stopped judging anything and just returned file paths and line ranges, the quality complaints disappeared. The expensive model still does all the reading that matters, just on 10% of the bytes.

Re: Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%

#109
post #102

It takes true corporate dedication to publish technical thought leadership on a page that actively fights your ability to read it.

"The seat license isn't what hurts, it's the tokens." not X, but Y... so this is very likely Opus 5 text, given timing and how it reads. has all the marks of it, one being very weird wording which makes it so hard to read the text.

...the remaining 10% of their Claude usage ;-)

> modes are the load-bearing piece:

Okay, this write-up is filled with Claudisms.

Re: Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%

#110
post #104

What great productivity gains are Spotify achieving in making their product worse?

The spotify desktop app is one of the worst pieces of software by a major company I have ever used.

I timed how long it took to open Spotify and play a song on a $2500 Mac on low latency gigabit fiber internet.

15 seconds.

Incredible stuff.

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