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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

#381

Post by drob518 »

leptons wrote: post #337
drob518 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, fair enough. Clearly, if they increase costs by too much, people will go to their competitors, but those competitors also make money selling tokens, so the whole industry is incentivized to inflate token consumption up to the point of driving people to the competition. And nobody is incentivized to reduce token count. In fact, the one model with great price/performance is Deepseek v4 Flash and I suspect that th…

Any AI service that people (and to some extent companies) can afford to pay for today is being heavily subsidized. Will that last forever? I really don't know how those economics work, but I know that bubbles do burst having lived through the dot com burst in 2000. And I know this current one is going to hurt if/when it bursts.

On the issue of the bubble, I’m right there with you, 100%. I’m not sure that “subsidized” is the right word for Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s pricing, though. I’d say it’s forward-priced. Supposedly, they have claimed that inference by itself is profitable; it’s the ongoing training that is not. I don’t know what nuances apply to that, however.

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

#382

Post by butlike »

exe34 wrote: post #345
palmotea wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Throw the whole thing on auto, check out, and go do something else during the day. If that's what you're doing, you're fucked (in today's society, at least). What happens to your job when they figure out that's what you're doing?

They need somebody to blame though, and you're much cheaper than a consultant.

I'm just thinking: The result is net-net the same. Either they terminate your contract as a salaried employee or they do it as a consultant. The fee is higher as a consultant and you never have to say you were fired. You're making a really good argument for getting into consulting.

You can just answer the same rote questions to different companies for max salary, then when the going gets tough you can essentially 'fire' the company and say they've moved past your core consulting paradigm. Maybe suggest a new consultant and move one. Rinse; repeat.

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

#383

Post by butlike »

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.

Mine does (Sample size: 1)

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

#384

Post by anonym29 »

drob518 wrote: post #380
anonym29 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pi has way too many batteries included, including a bunch I don't want, and lacked the batteries I did want. Pi is a bit like the movie Idiocracy in that the idea is much better than the execution. Incidentally, I also have zero supply chain attack surface as I have zero dependencies in my agent, just go stdlib. Pi, again, has 130+ transitive dependencies asking me to trust the security of my system to 150+ additiona…

Agreed that the node cesspool is a risk. That said, what batteries does Pi have that you don’t want?

Bloated TUI library, unified multi-provider LLM layer, bloated RPC and SDK modes, the entire plugin framework, the list goes on and on.

For reference, pi-coding-agent, by itself (not including dependencies, tests, or pi-ai, pi-tui, pi-agent-core, etc), is ~41,653 SLOC taking up ~1658.9 KiB across 163 files.

My agent, excluding dependencies (all go stdlib) and tests, is 3 files, 946 SLOC, taking up 36.3 KiB, and includes a basic TUI and an XMPP transport channel (including TLS for XMPP), with dynamically configurable delivery to and receipt from either or both, including allowlists for XMPP message partners. It has tool calling, a permission model with whitelisting and interactive permission querying on a per-tool basis, full thinking support, including the ability to toggle hiding or showing it across either or both transports repeatedly throughout an individual session, the same tools as pi comes with out of the box, plus web search, and a tool to vet, build, and git commit golang projects all in one go, stopping if errors are observed. Configurable model and endpoint, too.

Incidentally, the open source xmpp server (prosody) and metasearch engine (SearXNG) are both self-hosted, too.

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

#385

Post by rendx »

gosub100 wrote: post #378
rendx wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am asking them to reconsider and reflect on what that kind of language use does. You're the one reading it as "calling them out". How else are we supposed to learn from each other, voice our opinions, point out our mistakes to each other? For me, this is communication. And currently 8 upvotes seem to agree with me and my request. Feel free to ignore it, or consider it, for your own use of language. But, sorry, to m…

PTSD sucks on its own. Trying to blame other people for its symptoms is a deflection. It would be like someone with ADHD blaming his inability to concentrate on everyone else in the room making noise or moving around. People with OCD tried this, acting like it's a Monopoly property that you have to pay rent for if you land on it / say its name. If anything, it's a net positive people are talking about mental health a…

I agree with what you say? I think you're reading something into my writing that I didn't mean to imply. A headache is not a migraine is not cluster headache is not multiple sclerosis. We have vocabulary so we can express ourselves in an attempt to communicate. I am inviting people to reconsider their use of language when it comes to severe challenges such as PTSD. We are here to exchange opinions after all. If you find that offensive, so be it. You decide for yourself how you express your disapproval; two opinions can stand next to each other without introducing "blame" or "deflection".

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

#386

Post by fabioz »

prymitive wrote: post #18
jakozaur wrote: post #5

This isn’t limited to large system prompts. Coding-agent harnesses are also becoming more aggressive about using tools, even for trivial requests. In our tests, prompts such as “Hey” or “commit” sometimes triggered 30+ tool calls: https://quesma.com/blog/the-true-cost-of-saying-hi-to-an-ai-... Tokenflation seems very real: the number of tokens consumed by simple tasks keeps increasing.

I often find myself annoyed when Opus fixes a typo in a comment and decides to run tests, lints and whenever else it can find to run. Often it will start by stashing current changes just to preemptively check if all tests were passing before. And I can blame myself a bit because my rules do say: verify all changes with tests. But as there is that I in AI that is hyped which you’d think means it knows not to put tomat…

That's one of the reasons I started https://beolis.com. Now I have a workflow that says to do things in a TDD and run only new tests and related tests but NEVER run the full suite and then when it finishes the workflow runs all the tests -- if it works, great, if it doesn't then the workflow continues, feeds the output to a cheaper LLM to summary the errors and then get another run to actually fix it, based on the failures and the context based on what should be implemented.

-- note: I've been full time in Beolis for some months already, feedback welcome ;)

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

#387

Post by bloppe »

mikegioia wrote: post #374
int_19h wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's in the same ballpark at all. I checked the `/usage` in my session which uses a Max x5 plan. One day I had used $400 of tokens and 20% of my Fable allocation. Anthropic is effectively giving us more tokens per $ on the monthly plans but it comes at the cost of Anthropic being the prompt-writers and managers of the agents pretty much entirely. I don't think this is a bad deal.

Whether or not it's a bad deal depends on what you're comparing it to. Compared to API pricing, of course a subscription through CC is a good deal. But when OAI offers their super-subsidized plan and allows you to use your own harness which is 75% more token-efficient, then the CC deal starts looking like a bad one in comparison.

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

#389

Post by bcjdjsndon »

cmiles74 wrote: post #160
nijave wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a couple side by sides on web chat with the same prompt on Opus 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8 and the output gets longer/more verbose on version increment. The enerr variants are definitely much wordier. On the other hand, the newer variants also tend to benchmark higher so it's not quite a clean argument of "hey the new version eats more tokens"

I think both things can be true: new models benchmark higher and eat more tokens.

Unless somebody improved on the underlying transformer architecture... Surely AI is smart enough to do it by now

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

#390

Post by bcjdjsndon »

cyanydeez wrote: post #253
claw-el wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs might be trained to produce tokens, but Anthropic don’t have to price by tokens. If an organization is a ‘non-profit’ and they decided to design their pricing to be tokens-based, I get it. If a for-profit design their pricing to be tokens-based, I don’t know where are they drawing the line between profit vs benefit. That doubts makes it hard for me to be a customer. Disclaimer, I still use Claude…

tokens definitely measure compute.

You can ask it to verbatim produce training data and that takes very little compute for a lot of output tokens
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