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

engineering.atspotify.com

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

#111
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 desperately miss their old XULRunner app. No longer worked through the API as of ~3 years ago and was a sad day for me.

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

#112
post #18

So this is just delegating certain work to dumber models? I certainly wouldn't use Gemini 2.5 Flash (!!?) for code writing as suggested. I've never had an issue with Codex or Claude reading massive files, they're really good at precise greps.

> I've never had an issue with Codex or Claude reading massive files Reading files isn't a problem they want to solve. The idea seems to be using a cheaper model to "scout" for the intended code, instead of an expensive one that reads all the things (and spends more tokens / thinks about them). I think this might be useful because Opus 5 especially tends to over-read. So this looks like an "LLM Bloom filter", telling…

I have a stage-gated workflow that prioritizes “premium” token efficiency (Fable.) and getting the most out of my subscription services. (Which boils down to Fable running carefully prompted deepseek-flash agent teams that defer back to the managing agent for any design decisions in most work.) As part of that workflow the manager uses cheap reconnaissance agents to burn their tokens in order to build relevant repo context, instead of the managing model’s. I’ve been doing this since they released Opus and it occurred to me that most of my pre-implementation phase token use was going right into the garbage bin with file reads that have to be done to find the relevant code, but are very wasteful.

There’s an added benefit that the manager’s focus on strategy and task decomposition before actually handling the user’s prompted task directly seems to be a very good way to interact with Claude’s Fable safeguards, and I haven’t had any refusals doing this.

And while I haven’t ran any numbers, I can get orders of magnitude more out of my claude subscription doing this, especially with deepseek-v4-flash being as good as it is for as cheap as it is.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try it yourself, use a big model like Opus or Sol to implement everything by first making a plan using plan mode. When I do this, I can have it use cheap subagents with models like Luna to read the relevant files.

Do you have the cheap models summarize the files? How do they get the relevant information to the bigger models?

"Use subagents as applicable. Use sonnet/luna for finding relevant code references"

This should have been the entirety of TFA.

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

#114
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.

My favorite part about the desktop app is the 1 second delay between when I click a playlist and when it actually loads.

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

#115
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "LLM Bloom filter" very good way to put it.

It's not a great analogy, since Bloom filters are guaranteed to not have any false negatives, only false positives. That property would be very useful here, but I don't see how it would be achievable using LLMs.

still a great analogy even if not techincally equivalent

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

#117
post #114
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My favorite part about the desktop app is the 1 second delay between when I click a playlist and when it actually loads.

You just need to have a M5, 128gi setup to get sub 1 sec playlist loads /s

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

#118
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.

Do you pay for Spotify? If so, I hope you never have to experience the dumpster fire that is their free version. Half the time you select a song to play it'll just start playing related tracks.

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

#119

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.

Unlike an actual Bloom filter (which does not return false negatives), the cheaper model is still trusted to correctly recognize synonyms, equivalent functional constructions etc.

One is strictly a performance optimization, the other is a speed/quality tradeoff. It might well be a very good one, but it’s a tradeoff nevertheless. The framing is misleading.

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