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Once I realized that Anthropic is a token merchant, I start to understand Anthropic’s decision more. They are always finding reasons for you to use more tokens through them unless the users revolt or demand some guardrails.
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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"

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I think both things can be true: new models benchmark higher and eat more tokens.
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From my experience new models are slower and use more tokens even on questions which gpt 4 answered correctly. It is mostly because newer models tend to be more verbose (even with prompt requesting short answers).
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I bailed on Anthropic the moment they started blocking alternative harnesses like pi on their subscription plans.
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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.
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But they gave us double the tokens! Then a limited time more usage! Then even more tokens "off peak" times! Then some new model released but apparently it inherently used 1.69x tokens! Then Fable is here but "it uses much more usage". But only until ~~the US banned it~~ ~~7th July~~ ~~19th July~~ who even knows.

At this point I think Dario is just in his wellness retreat adjusting a revenue/profit dial.

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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.
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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.

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now reealize that LLMs are trained to produce tokens and like the halting problem, cant be trained not to produce tokens and youll realiE the AI labs are the perfect essential capitalist and like cancer, will keep growing useless tokens until it kills its host.

no amount of alignment will stop aomeone drom just shutting up.

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I thought I read somewhere that according to filings for going public, subscription revenue is tiny… like 5%.

Edit: consumer Claude subs are the 5%. I’d bet most all of CC subs lump in under enterprise.

  - API & Enterprise: 75% to 85% of total revenue.
  - Business Subscriptions: Roughly 10% to 15%.
  - Individual Subscriptions: About 5%.
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So the incentive to have Claude Code use more tokens should be even stronger then as AI & Enterprise are using consumption based pricing.
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The vast majority of my company's enterprise plan use is through Claude Code even though we have access to the API and could be using OpenCode instead.

I don't fully agree with the premise that they intentionally increase system prompts, but the enterprise plan usage is going to make that a huge income for Anthropic.

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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.
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Nope, that’s not true, because they want you to pay for the higher subscription bracket.
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That strategy only makes sense if there's an abundance of tokens, but that's not the case. AI companies are spending a ton of resources on improving token efficiency because they are all severely GPU constrained. Anthropic instead nudges you to move to a higher tier by setting rate limits.
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Can confirm — they got me paying $100/mo this way.

Also I think it’s well known that OpenAI is the much less expensive option (in tokens and $$). For the same $20 you get a lot more mileage.

Curious if folks have strong opinions about the overall UX of OpenCode vs CC…

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For me as well, at least this month to use more of Fable. We'll see if they extend Fable access because of people like me.
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Generally, companies with >150 people can’t use subs. So yeah, it’s mostly a funnel for devs/small companies to eventually vet for the product and convince their enterprise to use it as well.
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Well since what you get for your subscription is unknown it would be trivial to get that result without burning tokens.

Especially since compute is such a scarce resource.

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If they wanted to play games with sub tiers they would just change the rate limits rather than wasting inference.
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Flip side is customer psychology. Choosing a more expensive tier leaves better emotion.

Also i doubt there was jira ticket with “make llm more verbose”, rather ticket with “bug makes llms too verbose” gets prioritised taking revenue impact into account.

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Enterprise users are not paying a fixed fee, though
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Yeah, I strongly recommend against Claude Enterprise, it is ridiculously expensive and hard to control costs.
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> I use pi btw

Not sure if intentionally meant as a reference, but it gives "I use Arch btw" vibes.

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Pi is one of the ways out of this problem (OpenCode another) so I took it as an intentional reference as it is highly relevant. I also use Pi as my daily driver and I think it's a wise choice to figure out how to decouple yourself from lab-specific harnesses that you have little control or observability over.
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the amount of system prompt wastage going on in orgs is insane. we identified 400k in annual burn for zero value in just one section of our large company.

and the interesting thing about system prompt wastage is its a cost that scales non linearly with subagent use.

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The non-linearity is interesting. Is the default behavior for subagents in CC/OpenCode loading the same full system prompt (or AGENTS.md)?
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> This is supported by the fact that they won't let you use your sub on a different coding agent

I mean, that's a very weak argument? Isn't a much more plausible explanation that with your tooling you'll have more of a lock-in than with just your model?

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Neither is mutually exclusive.

They get lock-in, and through that lock-in are more effectively able to inflate token usage.

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