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Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

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Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

#291

Post by FridgeSeal »

hoppp wrote: post #264
jumpkick wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the entire team is vibe coding and there is no human audit then there is no way but to vibe code, for sure. I would also just vibe it if there is no responsibility, but if I do it that way I don't even care what happens with the project. I get so detached from it that I stop caring and if it has huge critical bugs..I just don't care anymore because it's not my responsibility or my code at all at that point. I'm ju…

> I just don't care anymore because it's not my responsibility or my code at all at that point

Yep, 100%.

Business has made it clear they don’t care, so there’s no point in burning one’s energy. Throw the whole thing on auto, check out, and go do something else during the day.

Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

#293

Post by nihsett »

mcv wrote: post #53

What 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…

They optimized it to burn more token in the recent months I feel. I made a small ~100 line change to a codebase by hand and threw claude at it to review. It spawned several sub-agents and burnt a ton of tokens. I guess the word 'review' now triggers some sort of in-built skill or something. It's absurd how rapid enshittification is taking over.

Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

#294

Post by bloppe »

azinman2 wrote: post #211
athrowaway3z wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bailed on Anthropic the moment they started blocking alternative harnesses like pi on their subscription plans.

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.

Sounds like they're modeling their PR on the classic Apple playbook: "choice is bad, and you should appreciate the constraints we've generously imposed"

Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

#295

Post by bloppe »

crewindream wrote: post #151
lkbm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unlikely they'd be this dumb. The way to get us to use more tokens is to make those tokens more useful, not less. Anthropic is full of people (including higher-ups) who know this.

But it is much much simpler to make it consume more tokens. It’s like that saying “What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”, but in this case it is one company. There is definitely a conflict of interest.

It's the same conflict of interest quite literally any business has. What stops any business from over-charging? Competition.

Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

#297

Post by oxzidized »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #290
mancerayder wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the QA team bearing the brunt of the unexpected issues, bugs, performance etc or is it business-as-usual?

Amusing that you think businesses still have QA teams.

Parent comment said they end up "...pass[ing] it off to QA."

Edit: suppose that very well could have been tongue-in-cheek.

Side note: as someone who has been interested in programming for a while, but didn't end up in a software dev track in life, it's been pretty wild watching the ride you all have been going on lately. I used to be pretty bummed I didn't get to do that kind of work for a living, but lately I've been feeling more and more like I dodged a bullet.

Not that I don't have my own AI-related junk I have to deal with where I did end up, of course. I think most have.

Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

#298

Post by shusaku »

korrectional wrote: post #26

My 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.

Anecdotally at least Claude code uses less api money for me than other harnesses. I think people might be missing some caching discount?

Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

#299

Post by hetspookjee »

adastra22 wrote: post #116
btown wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint: in a complex project, Fable's "curiosity" may be exactly what you want for an exploration and planning stage - not just for the orchestrator that turns your prompt into different angles with which to explore, but for each subagent whose task is to search the codebase for one of those "angles." If you truly want no stone unturned, letting those subagents spawn their own discoveries, and recursively…

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.

Next time it does that expensive scan, run order it to keep or update an index on the codebase. It really helps prevent these expansive scans if you have additional markdown files for LLM navigation.

Re: Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

#300

Post by gwerbin »

sgc wrote: post #216
EMM_386 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but one of the key things about subagents is they keep all of their tool calls and exploration out of the parent context. If you plan on continuing on in the parent, and aren't going to necessarily be touching the systems the other agents are exploring, it can be worth it. It's useful in certain situations where the parent context may need the "10,000 foot" view of something without going back in there. But subsy…

It seems like there could be a useful strategy of writing a plan with a main agent, and then instead of spawning subagents to implement, fork the main context to write each part. Then use one last fork to verify the work. That way you keep reusing the same context without polluting your main context for when you are ready to continue.

I've started doing this by hand in OpenCode and it works pretty well. But there's no UI support for maintaining a tree of related session forks so there's a little bit of manual fussing involved with session naming to keep organized. I also like to end a session with an "AI-friendly terse but detailed summary" (or some equivalent prompt) that I can then dump out to a Markdown file and then the mainline session can still get info back from the branch session. I don't know how much of this is automatable with OpenCode plugins, or in another hackable harness like Pi.
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