The right model is rarely "the biggest one" or "the cheapest one" — it's the smallest model that clears the task's quality bar within its latency and cost budget, with a path to escalate the hard cases. This skill makes that trade-off explicit and defensible, and ties it to an eval so the choice is measured, not vibes.
Model Selection Advisor is a community-contributed Claude Code skill in the general-misc sub-category. It ships as a SKILL.md file that Claude Code auto-discovers under ~/.claude/skills/model-selection-advisor/ and loads when your prompt matches the skill's trigger.
When to invoke it: Use when asked which model to use, whether to upgrade/downgrade a model, how to cut LLM costs without hurting quality, or to justify a model choice. Produces a recommendation with the decision criteria, a per-option comparison, a routing strategy (cheap-by-default, escalate when needed), and how to validate the choice with an eval.
The Model Selection Advisor Claude Code skill is built for Claude Code users and developers across all disciplines looking for general-purpose AI assistance. It's part of ClaudSkills (also referred to as Claude Skills or Claude Code Skills) — the open community-curated registry of 196,000+ SKILL.md files for Anthropic's Claude Code agent and the wider Claude ecosystem (Claude API, Claude Agent SDK).
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/model-selection-advisor curl -L https://claudskills.com/skills/model-selection-advisor/SKILL.md \ -o ~/.claude/skills/model-selection-advisor/SKILL.md
Or just download SKILL.md directly and drop it into ~/.claude/skills/model-selection-advisor/. Claude Code auto-discovers it on next session.
Skills live at ~/.claude/skills/model-selection-advisor/SKILL.md on macOS/Linux, or %USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\model-selection-advisor\SKILL.md on Windows. See the full install guide for step-by-step instructions.
Open @claudskills_bot on Telegram, tap Open Desktop App, and the desktop app installs this skill for you. Or share the bot link with a colleague — they get the same one-tap install. Learn more →
The ClaudSkills desktop app installs any skill directly into ~/.claude/skills/ with one click — no terminal required. Pro starts at $9/mo or $149 lifetime.
For the full experience including quality scoring and one-click install features for each skill — upgrade to Pro.
SKILL.md from the source repository to ~/.claude/skills/model-selection-advisor/SKILL.md and restart Claude Code. Both flows are detailed at claudskills.com/install/.SKILL.md file that lives under ~/.claude/skills/<name>/ and tells the Claude Code CLI agent how to perform a specific task (instructions, prompts, allowed tools). Skills are auto-discovered at session start. Model Selection Advisor is one of 67,000+ skills indexed in the open ClaudSkills catalog, classified under the General category. Learn more at /learn/what-is-a-claude-skill/.If you reference this skill in a blog post, paper, or documentation, you can cite it as:
@misc{model-selection-advisor-2026,
author = {mohitagw15856},
title = {Model Selection Advisor [Claude Code skill]},
year = {2026},
publisher = {ClaudSkills},
url = {https://claudskills.com/skills/model-selection-advisor/}
}Grade A · scanned 2026-09-28 — free static scan against the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10.
No risk patterns were found in any of the ten OWASP-aligned categories. How grading works ›
Browse all General skills in the ClaudSkills registry, or explore these other picks from the same category:
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SKILL.md files, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.