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FYI you can modify the system prompt using mitmproxy. Just ask your agent to walk you through it. Anthropic system prompts are gnarly and geared towards the lowest common denominator.
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> FYI you can modify the system prompt using mitmproxy

The system prompt is injected into your context on the server side.

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there is literally a --system-prompt flag for claude code. In my mitmproxy experiments using that flag appended to the existing system prompt rather than replacing it. So I had to create a little helper to strip the system prompt sent over the wire and add my own.

here is a collection of public system prompts from claude code: https://github.com/Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts

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Use --system-prompt-file, it will replace the whole system prompt (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/cli-reference ). You'll have to use a shell alias or function or something to always append this flag when calling Claude Code but you don't need any MitM shenanigans. Then use "/context all" to see what else is sent (here I would recommend MitM'ing since Claude Code won't show the exact tools and text), there are a lot of tools no one needs and they are bloating the context, you can deny these in the settings.json (there is also a list here: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/tools-reference ). Also set "disableClaudeAiConnectors" to false to remove even more bloat.
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I tried both --system-prompt and --system-prompt-file. they both appended when i tried about 6 months ago and watched the traffic. Yes I cleanup all those tools etc.
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--system-prompt-file replaces the prompt, I use it myself and the docs state it, too.
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thinking you can control what happens to some strings you send over the network.

...the absolute state of the token maximizers.

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Claude, think for me. Make no mistakes.
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I dont think itll be an issue. Opus 5.5 now is way more than enough for me and open weight models will reach that level by the time subsidization stops
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640K [RAM] ought to be enough for anybody!
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People were perfectly happy with 640k ram at the time that phrase was uttered.
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> People were perfectly happy with 640k ram at the time that phrase was uttered.

I'm assuming this is a sarcastic response to the person who said "640K [RAM] ought to be enough for anybody!"

Because, as somebody who was around when we had 640 K RAM, people certainly weren't happy with that amount.

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Ah, the hours spent tweaking CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to run a MS-DOS game that squeezed every last byte of those 640K, good times.
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EMS...
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Regardless of the time, people have always happily accepted more.
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I’d argue most “people” haven’t actually needed more in a very long time other than to keep the same old software running. The requirements bloat of operating systems, browsers, and majority of software isn’t really a generalized “people” thing; more so the state of the industry being a form of inertial bloat.
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The phrase probably wasn't uttered by anyone it's attributed to: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/. Even "the time" is unknown.
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And Bill probably _didn't_ do anything on Epstein Island...
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[dead]
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It's enough for you now, but I feel like part of the mythology of our future is that we'll be continued to be employed because we'll be working on more complex problems, with smarter LLMs at our side.
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I do think there's a decent case to be made that this will be the case for the foreseeable future, and perhaps the mythology part is beyond that.

Although as soon as I wrote 'foreseeable future' I came to the realization that this is far far far less far out than it used to be. Which might mean I simply agree with you.

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> Yea if i use opus 5.5 in api through openrouter and pi agent harness I will easily burn 50-100$ a day (and with fable 5.1 i could burn 200$ easily).

Checked yesterday, for that day alone I had used $168 worth on my $20 subscription in Claude Code. I still had plenty of weekly use left. Seems like subscriptions are discounted at a 1:10 rate?

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Nice, good to see an up-to-date reference on this.

EDIT: That was a delightfully thorough analysis. Nice to see Anthropic taking the value crown, only because Opus 5.5 is such a joy to use.

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Only think missing from the analysis, and it's a big one, is a comparison on the basis of work done. For a fixed set of real tasks, how much of your quota (or api usage) does it take you to accomplish it.

Because a big part of the price difference is due to Anthropic's models being more expensive that OpenAIs AND using more tokens for the same tasks (at least according to artificialanalysis.ai).

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Curious to know how much tokens/task will change the conclusion
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100%

I use a personal Claude account for personal projects and can let rabl run for an hour and barely make a dent into my usage

On the enterprise I have to be a lot more careful or I can burn through 2k in a week

The excuse they give is the guarantees you get with enterprise plans that they won’t look at your data

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What's rabl?
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Other than their typo there is a fun collision there with an older Ruby gem: https://github.com/nesquena/rabl
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Man, I recognized the name from my first job out of uni at a Rails shop in 2011.
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Meant fable*
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[dead]
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