The full chain is thorough and token-heavy: five plan challenges, a build, tests, a security check, five implementation challenges, and the bookkeeping around them. On a mid-size feature that plausibly lands in the low hundreds of thousands of tokens end to end. If you're paying per token, or working with a smaller model that gets less out of each round, that's real money for real diminishing returns.
So here's the honest cheaper shape. Same process, a fraction of the cost:
- start-up, then construct-the-plan as normal.
- frame-it stays. A five-question interview is the cheapest insurance in the whole chain; never cut it first.
- challenge-plan twice, not five times. Two genuinely different angles catch the worst of it.
- build-it and test-it as normal.
- challenge-implementation twice, not five times.
- wrap-up and handoff as normal.
When to spend on the full chain instead: work you'll live with for months, work that touches money or user data, work where being subtly wrong is expensive. The extra rounds exist because "done" and "right" aren't the same thing, and each fresh angle closes more of that gap.
Smaller models: the chain is plain instructions, so any capable model can follow it. Expect the challenge rounds to catch less per round; compensate with the angles that need the least cleverness (the sequence of steps, hostile inputs, config syntax) rather than more rounds.