7 AI Agents, One Command, 50% Cheaper Claude Code.

#ai #claude #productivity #opensource

People keep asking me to explain my workflow.

Senior devs at meetups. Friends I made at hackathons. Non-technical friends who watched me ship entire apps without typing a single line of code.

They were all fascinated and confused by how I use Claude Code.

So after dozens of "can you teach me how to do that?" conversations, I stopped explaining and started building. The result is Hydra a framework that makes Claude Code faster, cheaper, and smarter. And you don't need to understand any of it to use it.

The Problem

If you use Claude Code, you're probably running Opus(the best, largest model) for everything. Every file search. Every test run. Every docstring. Every git commit.

That's like hiring a $500/hr architect to carry bricks.

Opus is brilliant at planning, architecture, and hard problems.

But for reading files? Running tests? Writing docs? We don't need Opus. You're burning premium tokens on tasks that cheaper, faster models handle just as well.

The result:

Context window fills up fast → more compactions → more hallucinations
API costs stack up unnecessarily
Everything feels slower than it should

The Solution: Hydra

Hydra installs 7 specialized AI agents into your Claude Code setup. Each one runs on the cheapest model that can handle its job:

Agent	Model	What It Does
hydra-scout	🟢 Haiku 4.5	Explores your codebase, finds files
hydra-runner	🟢 Haiku 4.5	Runs tests, builds, linters
hydra-scribe	🟢 Haiku 4.5	Writes docs, READMEs, comments
hydra-guard	🟢 Haiku 4.5	Security scanning after code changes
hydra-git	🟢 Haiku 4.5	Git operations - commits, branches, diffs
hydra-coder	🔵 Sonnet 4.6	Writes and edits actual code
hydra-analyst	🔵 Sonnet 4.6	Debugging, code review, analysis

Opus 4.6 becomes the manager, not the laborer. It classifies incoming tasks, dispatches them to the right agent, glances at the output, and moves on.

You never notice. It's completely invisible.

One Command Install

npx hail-hydra-cc@latest

That's it. The interactive installer asks where you want it (global or project-level), deploys everything, registers hooks, and you're done.

No configuration required. No learning curve. No workflow changes. You just keep using Claude Code exactly like you always have, Hydra works in the background.

What You Get

7 agents - each specialized for a task type, running on the optimal model

7 slash commands - /hydra:status, /hydra:guard, /hydra:help, and more

3 hooks - auto-update checking, a status bar with context window usage, and a file change tracker for security scanning

A status bar that shows you what's happening:

🐉 │ Opus │ Ctx: 37% ████░░░░░░ │ $0.42 │ my-project

The Technical Bit (for the curious)

Hydra is inspired by Speculative Decoding a technique from LLM inference where a small, fast model drafts outputs and a large model verifies them in parallel. Since verification is cheap (checking is faster than generating), you get 2-3x speedups with zero quality loss.

Hydra applies this at the task level (far too simplified flow):

User Request → Opus classifies (< 1 second)
                    │
        ┌───────────┼───────────┐
        ▼           ▼           ▼
    hydra-scout  hydra-coder  hydra-runner
    (Haiku 4.5)  (Sonnet 4.6) (Haiku 4.5)
        │           │           │
        └───────────┼───────────┘
                    ▼
           Opus verifies (quick glance)
                    │
              ✅ Ship it  or  🔄 Redo it myself

Key optimizations built in:

Speculative pre-dispatch: hydra-scout launches in parallel with task classification, so by the time Opus decides what to do, the codebase context is already available
Session indexing: codebase structure persists across turns, no re-exploration
Fire-and-forget: non-critical tasks (docs, commits) run without blocking
Auto-accept: factual outputs (file listings, test results) skip Opus review entirely

Cost Savings

With a typical task distribution (50% Haiku, 30% Sonnet, 20% Opus):

	Without Hydra	With Hydra
Input cost	$5.00/MTok (all Opus)	~$2.40/MTok (blended)
Output cost	$25.00/MTok (all Opus)	~$12.00/MTok (blended)
Speed	1x	2-3x faster
Quality	Opus-level	Opus-level (verified)

~50% cost reduction. And because each agent operates in its own focused context window instead of one overloaded one, you get longer sessions with fewer compactions.

For Pros: It's Fully Customizable

If you want to dig deeper:

Every agent is a simple Markdown file (if you prefer, edit the model: field to swap models)
Config modes: conservative, balanced, or aggressive delegation
Add your own agents using the included template
Dispatch logs show exactly which agent handled what