My Agent Orchestrator Burned 1-2M Opus Tokens Per Task. Here's the Postmortem.

I built an orchestration skill for Claude Code that delegated everything to subagents. It worked. It also cost somewhere on the order of 1-2 million Opus tokens per task - including tasks whose final diff was a handful of lines. Nothing was broken. Every individual decision was defensible. Three modest multipliers stacked, and then the whole stack ran on every single request. This is the postmortem, the redesign, and the enforcement layer I should have written first. v1: pure delegation The design goal was context hygiene. The main session gets polluted fast - it accumulates file contents, tool output, and dead ends, and its judgment degrades as the window fills. So: don't let it do any work. Make it a coordinator, and give every unit of real work a fresh context. That produced four rules: A hard gate. The main session was forbidden from reading, editing, or running anything itself. Every action went through a subagent. A fixed 5-phase pipeline on every task: Plan → Approve → Execute → Review → Report. Fresh subagents per phase. No reuse. Each phase got clean context by construction. Mandated reviewers with "loop until clean." A review phase that re-ran until it found nothing. And the trigger was broad - essentially any actionable request. "do this," "implement," "fix," "build," "change." Read those four rules again with a cost lens instead of a correctness lens. That is the whole postmortem. The three multipliers 1. The dispatch schema made model optional The subagent dispatch tool takes a model parameter. My skill never set it. Omitted, it inherits from the parent session - which was Opus 4.8. So every subagent, including the ones whose entire job was "read this file and summarize it," ran on the most expensive tier available. Here's what that actually costs at list prices: Model Input $/MTok Output $/MTok vs. Opus Claude Opus 4.8 ( claude-opus-4-8 ) $5.00 $25.00 1× Claude Sonnet 4.6 ( claude-sonnet-4-6 ) $3.00 $15.00 0.6× Claude Haiku 4.5 ( claude-haiku-4-5 ) $1.