A cheap model runs your agent 24/7. Claude Code (on your subscription) whispers in its ear when things get tricky.
OpenClaw agents consume a LOT of tokens — tool calls, retries, long conversations. Running on a mid-tier model through API easily costs hundreds of dollars per month. Opus? Forget it.
People used to work around this by routing OpenClaw through their Claude Pro/Max subscription instead of API keys — the subscription subsidized far more usage than raw API credits. But Anthropic recently shut that down.
The workaround: run your agent on a cheap model ($0.10-0.50/M tokens — MiniMax, Kimi, Haiku, GLM, etc.) and use Claude Code as the advisor. Claude Code runs on your existing Claude subscription. Your agent handles 90% of tasks alone. For the remaining 10% — the non-trivial ones — it consults Claude Code, which can use the smartest model you have access to (even Opus) within your subscription quota.
You get frontier-level reasoning on a budget-model budget.
This is inspired by The Advisor Strategy from Anthropic: Sonnet paired with an Opus advisor scored higher than Sonnet alone on SWE-bench Multilingual while costing 12% less per task. Same idea, but instead of paying for Opus API calls, you're using your subscription.
Most tasks an agent handles are straightforward: send a message, set a reminder, look something up. A cheap model handles these fine. But when a task requires planning — multiple steps, unfamiliar tools, risk of breaking something — the cheap model guesses and fails.
The fix: before executing anything non-trivial, the agent calls Claude Code and asks "how should I do this?" The advisor returns a plan (typically 400-700 tokens), the agent follows it. The advisor never executes — only thinks.
Add this to your TOOLS.md:
## Advisor
Before executing a non-trivial task, consult the advisor for a plan.
**When to use:**
- Task has more than one obvious step
- You're unsure about the right approach
- Task could break something if done wrong
**When NOT to use:**
- Simple single-action tasks (send message, set reminder, add to list)
- Pure coding tasks — send those to the coding agent to DO the work, not advise
- You already know how to execute
**Call:**
bash pty:true workdir:<PROJECT_OR_HOME_DIR> command:"claude -p 'You are an advisor. I am an AI agent that received a task. I need ADVICE — do NOT do the task, only give me a plan.
TASK: <what the user asked>
CONTEXT: <what you know — files, prior attempts, what works/doesn't>
MY TOOLS: <your available tools>
Give a step-by-step plan: which tools, what order, what parameters. If any step needs code — say to delegate to a coding agent. Warn about pitfalls.'"
**Rules:**
- One call, then wait (1-5 min, advisor only thinks)
- Execute the plan yourself; code steps go to coding agent as usual
- If plan fails twice — ask the user, don't keep guessingThat's it. No packages to install, no config files. Your agent reads the instruction, calls claude -p when stuck, gets a plan, follows it.
- Cost: Your main agent runs on a ~$0.15/M model. The advisor runs on your Claude subscription — no extra API spend. The advisor generates ~500 tokens per consultation, so even heavy use barely dents your quota.
- Quality: The cheap model stops guessing multi-step approaches. It asks someone smarter, then executes confidently.
- Safety: "Think before you act" prevents the agent from trying random things that break your system.
- Separation: The advisor sees your project files (via
workdir) but never modifies them. It only returns text.
User says: "Post about our project on Reddit"
Without advisor — agent opens headless browser, Reddit blocks it, agent tries curl, gets 403, tries again, wastes 10 minutes and 50K tokens.
With advisor — agent asks Claude Code: "How do I post on Reddit? I have a headless browser (blocked by Reddit) and a desktop Chromium on display :1 with xdotool." Advisor replies: "Use the desktop browser. Steps: 1) open reddit.com/r/... via xdotool 2) click Create Post 3) type title 4) submit." Agent follows the plan, done in 2 minutes.
The example uses claude -p (Claude Code CLI on a Claude subscription). You can substitute with any smarter model:
- Claude Code (subscription):
claude -p 'prompt'— the sweet spot, uses your existing quota - Codex:
codex exec 'prompt' - API call:
curlto any model endpoint (if you prefer to pay per token) - OpenClaw subprocess:
sessions_spawnwith a smarter model profile
The pattern is model-agnostic. The only requirement: the advisor must be meaningfully smarter than your executor.