Imagine pi.dev…
Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
231–240 of 433 posts
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I were anthropic I’d force that too. They offer the harness and if they control the entire pipeline then they can optimize the entire experience. It doesn’t have to be nefarious.
It's like Microsoft banning Vim users that use Azure
They didn't ban people from using Claude, though. They banned them from their flat-fee subscription and required that you pay per token.
It's still questionable but I don't think it's in the same ballpark as what you describe.
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
The curiosity is inefficient though. So many times I have to stop the agent and tell it to just fucking write the code and try compiling it. Otherwise it will fill its entire context tracing through the program logic to derive from the code itself whether the thing it is about to do would work. It completely fails to notice it can just… try.
I think I use it differently. I still mainly stick to web UI. I write a good prompt, paste the code then copy the output code and place it into my project. So in the end I hand assemble and I only give it what it needs to know so no extra context wasted. The human in the loop is of course the secret sauce but this way I am highly efficient, no vibecode and I work really fast too. Everything is audited.
This is how I worked with LLMs originally, and I much preferred it. This gave me a much better understanding of the code that I was adding. But, there's no way to keep up with my team like this anymore. It's just too slow when everyone else is working directly in Claude Code.
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making the opposite argument. Anthropic is incentivized to use less tokens in Claude Code because people are paying a fixed monthly fee for subscriptions.
Nope, that’s not true, because they want you to pay for the higher subscription bracket.
Higher subscription brackets are likely worse for them. I recall seeing someone calculate that a fully maxed out highest subscription bracket is something like $15K in tokens?
And people paying $100 or $200 are much more likely to max it out for purely psychological reasons - it crosses that threshold where I want to see my money's worth in full. Whereas people on $20 subs are more likely to be there just to get access to better models and features, and are not necessarily even doing any substantial work.
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#235It is not the raw prompt size that matters ultimately, otherwise Pi (and variants) would be the lowest costing agents. What matters is how efficient the prompt it. Prompt minimalism often gets conflated with efficiency. Having said that, CC does seem bloated for what it does. What matters even more is tooling quality. Bad/buggy tooling causes a lot more roundtrips that wipes out all gains from initial greedy approach…
The good thing is that the competition in the field is very cutthroat with so many contenders, so if there are gains to be made they will be made, and then broadly adopted by others.
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anthropic's cache expires after 1 hour when using subscription endpoints, and for those cached tokens cache reads are free. It's generous (compared to API pricing) but it's not 100% free.
Isn’t it 5 minutes ttl now?
I believe it's 5 minutes on API pricing by default, though you can turn off caching or force it to 1 hour. Subscriptions are special, seemingly because Anthropic doesn't want to expose casual users to all of the tokenomics.
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#237Grok 4.5 is really fast, has more usage at $10/month than $20/month Claude pro, and Opus-level. Claude pro feels like a demo. Claude is much better in OpenCode then in Claude Code, OpenCode is just better than Claude Code. Claude Code feels like a complete mess to use comparatively.
Elon saying that it is "Opus level" doesn't actually make it so.
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#238My opinion is that claude code uses more tokens simply because Anthropic makes more money that way and forces people into their subscriptions. This is supported by the fact that they won't let you use your sub on a different coding agent. I use pi btw.
> My opinion is that claude code uses more tokens simply because Anthropic makes more money that way and forces people into their subscriptions. OTOH, this makes typical subscriptions usages consume more tokens, which are included in their flat fee. This sounds more like incompetence than malice.
It would be true if there was a unified "Anthropic" entity making every decision from pure rationality. Instead, more tokens increase Claude Code team's metrics of token usage, which most likely has a KPI around token usage and adoption.
To remind Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
..also to parent's point, yes the upsell is only appealing once user run's out of tokens.
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spawning a bunch of agents seems to happen randomly. I almost never want this.
In my CLAUDE.md I put: > CRITICAL: Do NOT spawn sub-agents for any reason. Perform all work in the main session. If a task is too large, ask me to break it down manually. > This is a big task, and can easily get too large. However, sub-agents make the situation worse, and eat through our token budget way too fast. Do not use them. > Take on manageable tasks. Don't try to do everything at once. When you start on a big…
If there's some "find the file" task, using full context for that isn't ideal.
Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
#240What really burns tokens is sub agents. I once gave Claude Code a pretty big task, and it immediately launched 7 sub agents which burned through my budget before even one of them was finished. Tried again 5 hours later: same result. If I let the main agent do the same task sequentially, it was no problem at all. I don't know if it's really just communication and orchestration that makes sub agents so inefficient, or…
There is a negative incentive to fix problems that result in customers picking a more expensive plan to work around it. There are probably several engineers who have ideas about fixing this and they get apathy from many people and obstruction from a few, and sometimes active hostility by a manager somewhere in the chain.
The best you can do in such an environment is seek to introduce new features at the top tier, and then pull old features down the stack as the cost of those features has been amortized out, or to hurt your competitors by raising the ladder.