Grok 4.5 in Cursor: the workflow that separates planning from execution to save tokens

Burning through your Cursor plan’s tokens too fast? One solution could be Grok, the AI model developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s company!

These days Grok 4.5 is showing very promising results in coding, especially when used inside Cursor.

One particularly interesting workflow is to completely separate planning from execution.

Planning first: Plan Mode with the most capable models

Before opening Agent Mode, you spend more time in Plan Mode using models like GPT 5.6, Claude Opus 4.8 or Sonnet 5.

The goal is to define in detail:

• UX
• architecture
• edge cases
• APIs
• individual implementation steps

You keep iterating on the plan until it’s solid enough.

Then execution: Grok 4.5 Fast in Agent Mode

Only at that point do you switch to Grok 4.5 Fast in Agent Mode, letting it work on execution: feature development, bug fixing, refactoring, UI changes and API updates.

You go back to another model only when you need to rethink an architectural or product decision.

Why this approach reduces token consumption

This approach could significantly reduce token consumption on Cursor.

Grok 4.5 does seem very effective when it has to execute an already well-defined plan.

A lot of tokens get wasted when we ask the agent to figure out what to build while it’s already building it.

By separating reasoning from execution, we can use the more expensive models to make the important decisions and Grok 4.5 Fast to quickly turn them into code.

Have you already tried Grok 4.5 with Cursor? How is it working out for you?