A fresh developer-workflows install is token-frugal by default. The goal driving that is a simple one: all-day-autonomous coding on a smaller Claude plan, where the token budget is a hard daily constraint. When tokens are scarce, every session either respects the discipline or burns the day early — so the plugin has to make frugality the path of least resistance, not a thing you remember to do.

The trick is that this discipline is structural, not a matter of willpower. Routing the right model to each phase, staying quiet between tool calls, preferring Edit over Write, clearing at phase boundaries — these are steady habits, stable enough to bake into the plugin instead of leaving you to remember them. So they ship as built-in defaults, and you get the savings without hand-writing your own token-discipline rules.

The honest limit is that a plugin can only nudge — it cannot pull the levers for you. A hook can notice a session's context is large and suggest /compact, but it cannot actuate the command; model routing sets a sensible default per phase, but you can always override it with --model. Nudge-only is the ceiling, by design: the primitives lower the friction and keep the reminder in front of you, and the last step stays yours.

The four levers, each mapped to the primitive kind that carries it:

Lever	Primitive kind	Effect
Phase-aware model routing	model: frontmatter in agent defs + routing nudge in command prompts	/plan, /review, /design default to Sonnet; /work, /bugfix default to Opus
Terse output style	output-style at output-styles/terse.md	Silence between tool calls; preserves the end-of-task status report
Edit-over-Write rule	rule at rules/edit-over-write.md	Prefer Edit to Write for existing files; /clear over /compact at phase boundaries
Compact-nudge-on-resume hook	hook at hooks/compact-nudge-resume/	On resumed sessions with large context, emits an additionalContext nudge; nudge-only

Agent defs (worker.md, researcher.md, tech-lead.md) honor model: frontmatter — they spawn sub-processes and the host applies the field. Slash commands (/plan, /work, etc.) carry a model: + effort: frontmatter pin applied for the turn the command runs (turn-scoped host enforcement, not the advisory-only nudge this page originally shipped with — see the model-effort-routing design's 2026-07-04 P14c amendment).

Routing defaults, as designed:

• /work and /bugfix run under opusplan — the T1 · Execute build default (Opus plans, then Sonnet executes), not flat Opus. The global session default (~/.claude/settings.json, "model": "opusplan") already carries this; each command's own nudge text has not caught up (see the correction below).
• Sonnet — the current generation, claude-sonnet-5: worker.md (the spawned executor, T1), researcher.md, tech-lead.md, /plan, /review, /design — planning, authoring, read-only research, and execution.

Defaults are operator-overridable via claude --model or the /model command. The full model × effort tier scale (T0–T4 + the persona→tier map) lives in the model + effort routing design; worker.md is realigned to T1 there. The concrete model ids the tier scale currently draws from — including the T1/T0 seed rows and where a work-type resolves to opusplan vs. flat Sonnet — live in token-audit's versioned routing table, resolved per dispatch by its classify_work_type classifier (see both links below).

Two corrections, live and already-fired, not hypothetical:

• The agent-def frontmatter and every command's nudge text still name claude-sonnet-4-6 (and claude-opus-4-8 for /work//bugfix), not claude-sonnet-5. pricing.py added the claude-sonnet-5 row on 2026-07-03 (the same R0.7 repair pass); the roster hasn't been bumped to match. This is the content-refresh trigger the model-effort-routing design already names, caught live — see the Implementation table below for exactly which files.
• No command's nudge text mentions opusplan at all — work.md and bugfix.md both recommend flat "Opus 4.8," which understates what actually runs: the global default is opusplan (Opus plans, Sonnet executes), a two-model split, not a single strong model straight through.

The terse style is scoped to inter-tool chatter only. The end-of-task status report is explicitly carved out — it must remain detailed. This mirrors the carve-out in the global CLAUDE.md block and is regression-tested by tests/test_dw_terse_style.py.

Write re-emits the whole file as output tokens (~5x billed), while Edit emits only the changed strings. The rule covers the Edit-vs-Write call and adds a /clear-not-/compact reminder to plan.md and release.md's close-out section — the two commands that mark clean phase boundaries where state is on disk.

The hook fires on UserPromptSubmit and stays silent below 60% context (read via CLAUDE_CONTEXT_USAGE_PERCENTAGE if present, or a JSONL assistant-line count over 400 as a proxy). Above the threshold it emits an additionalContext nudge explaining the compact-vs-clear trade-off, including a rough numeric estimate when Part B's pricing.py is installed. Nudge-only is the permanent ceiling — hooks cannot actuate /compact.

Source locations, with each roster string's current (stale) vs. target value — the bump itself is [PENDING-IMPL], tracked as a PLAN-efficiency-automation task, not yet applied:

• src/developer-workflows/agents/worker.md — model: claude-sonnet-4-6 → target claude-sonnet-5
• src/developer-workflows/agents/researcher.md — model: claude-sonnet-4-6 → target claude-sonnet-5
• src/developer-workflows/agents/tech-lead.md — model: claude-sonnet-4-6 → target claude-sonnet-5
• src/developer-workflows/commands/plan.md — nudge text names claude-sonnet-4-6 → target claude-sonnet-5; gains a model:/effort: frontmatter pin (turn-scoped, replacing the nudge) + keeps the /clear reminder
• src/developer-workflows/commands/work.md — nudge text names flat claude-opus-4-8 → target: name opusplan explicitly (not a single model); gains a model:/effort: frontmatter pin
• src/developer-workflows/commands/review.md — nudge text names claude-sonnet-4-6 → target claude-sonnet-5; gains a model:/effort: frontmatter pin
• src/developer-workflows/commands/design.md — nudge text names claude-sonnet-4-6 → target claude-sonnet-5; gains a model:/effort: frontmatter pin
• src/developer-workflows/commands/bugfix.md — nudge text names flat claude-opus-4-8 → target: name opusplan explicitly; gains a model:/effort: frontmatter pin + keeps the /clear reminder
• src/developer-workflows/commands/spec.md, commands/interview-me.md — nudge text names claude-sonnet-4-6 → target claude-sonnet-5
• src/developer-workflows/output-styles/terse.md — new primitive
• src/developer-workflows/rules/edit-over-write.md — new primitive
• src/developer-workflows/hooks/compact-nudge-resume/hook.md — new primitive

• Parity with the global directive is the spec. The operator's ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md token-discipline block (2026-06-13) is authoritative; any divergence in these primitives is a defect.
• output-styles/ and rules/ are new subdirs within the developer-workflows plugin group — generate.py and lint_src.py may need generator patches to discover them (task 2 audits first). See the Composition design for the discovery-path decision.
• Compact-nudge context signal: CLAUDE_CONTEXT_USAGE_PERCENTAGE availability is confirmed at build; JSONL line-count proxy is the documented fallback.

• Development lifecycle design — the routing-defaults design decision (gaining the routed-dispatch + mandatory-announcement layer — see the forward pointer above)
• Composition design — the output-style/rule discovery-path decision
• Model + effort routing design — the T0–T4 tier + effort policy this page's static defaults are a hardcoded instance of
• Token-audit design — the measurement + budget-gate capability this efficiency protocol is being automated into, and the single home of current model ids (the versioned routing table, seeded and rendered there) plus the classify_work_type classifier that resolves a dispatch to one of its rows
• Customization types — what each primitive kind is
• Manifest Schema — frontmatter contract including model: and the discovery table
• Hooks — the hook catalog and how UserPromptSubmit events work