GoKawiilMost of what an AI coding agent does for me isn't thinking. It's I/O.
Reading five files to answer a question about one method. Generating a test file that follows the exact same pattern as the twenty test files next to it. Updating docs after a meeting. Thousands of tokens gone and almost zero reasoning. The seat license isn't what hurts, it's the tokens. And you're feeding all of it to a frontier model that's wildly overqualified. What if you could route the grunt work to something cheaper that handles it just as well, and save the expensive model for the problems that actually need it?
It’s hardly just my problem. By 2028, AI coding costs are expected to blow past the average developer's salary. A quarter of engineering leaders already burn $200–$500 per developer per month on tokens. Some are well past $2,000. The tooling pays for itself but only if you stop burning frontier tokens on work that doesn't need them.
Turns out, the fix didn't require a platform team or a new subscription. Just two modes.
Two modes, zero code
This is exactly the kind of use case AiKA Modes in Portal by Spotify were built for. A mode is a declarative agent that runs on an ephemeral runtime - think AWS Lambda, but for agents. You define the instructions, pick a model, set parameters like temperature, and attach MCP tools. Portal handles the rest. No infra to manage, no API keys, no long-running servers. Modes are callable from the Portal CLI or API. They can be public (shared with the whole company) or private.
For this router to work I created two modes. Both use Gemini 2.5 Flash as the worker model in the examples below, but the model field accepts any model you have configured in your Portal instance. Pick whichever works for you.
Mode 1: bulk-reader
For when Claude would otherwise read multiple large files just to answer one question.
name: bulk-reader description: Bulk file reader for code analysis - delegates I/O from Claude Code instructions: You are a precise code analyst. Read the provided files and answer the question concisely. Output structured bullets only. No greetings, no prose, no preambles. Lead every bullet with the exact name, type, or line number. Use nested bullets for details. Skip anything the caller did not ask for. visibility: public model: gemini-2.5-flash resourceLimits: temperature: 0.2 tags: - coding - delegation
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