What
The Stubborn Economizer defaults to economy-tier models for most tasks, which should keep costs low. But they lose those savings through repeated, non-productive turns when sessions go wrong.
Key Behaviors
They consistently choose the cheapest available model, which reduces per-session cost at the baseline. But when sessions fail or produce poor output, they keep retrying the same approach instead of clearing context, switching approaches, or starting fresh. They rarely use cache because they do not continue sessions — every new turn starts cold at full input cost. Their retry pattern compounds the problem: each retry re-pays the full input cost without the benefit of cache, and the repeated attempts erode whatever savings their model choice provided.
Implications
The Stubborn Economizer reveals a hidden cost of frugality: choosing cheap models does not protect you from behavioral waste. When sessions go wrong and the user keeps retrying instead of taking a different approach, the economy model savings disappear. The lesson is that model selection is only one lever — it does not protect you from high retry rates or low cache utilization. Fixing the retry behavior would unlock most of the wasted savings.
