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

706 points by systima 2mo ago

This started based off of a hunch. We usually use OpenCode, but were 'forced' to use Claude Code for a while due to issues with Meridian. In that time, we saw the usage meter rise much, much more quickly than when using OpenCode. This was the initial anecdotal evidence, but we undertook this small study to collect empirical data: We added logging between the agentic coding tool (Claude Code and OpenCode) and Anthropic's endpoint, and captured all requests (and the returned usage blocks). With one caveat (toward the end of the post) we found unambiguously that Claude Code was far more inefficient in terms of its cache strategy and its harness token usage than OpenCode.

feedthebots 2mo ago
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BobCat10 2mo ago
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vpbhardwaj 2mo ago
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OlegKostrikin 2mo ago
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Katlaszlo 2mo ago
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nubg 2mo ago
So? it doesnt matter, after the first turn it's cached. We are probably talking about single digit cents.
MallocVoidstar 2mo ago
> Claude Code 2.1.207 and OpenCode 1.17.18, both pinned to claude-sonnet-4-5 So not only is this article AI-written, but the testing was entirely done by AI, too? I can't see any other reason to use such an old model. > Our traffic passes through a local LLM gateway that wraps requests in its own envelope, a constant we measured at roughly 6,200 tokens with bare calibration requests Why do you need to do calibration requests to figure out how your own gateway is affecting requests? > Its subagent lane did not complete cleanly through our gateway > We attempted to toggle extended thinking in both harnesses and are declining to publish numbers. Our gateway applies its own thinking policy, neither harness's toggle demonstrably survived the path, and anything we quoted would be noise. Why is your own gateway screwing with your testing?
- systima 2mo ago
  Model: Cost, mainly. The runs went through a Claude Max subscription rather than metered API billing, and pinning an older stable snapshot kept run-to-run comparisons clean and cheap. The fixed harness payload (system prompt plus tool schemas), so the headline numbers shouldn't change too much. That said, happy to re-run the matrix on Fable and publish the diff; payload figures should barely move, tool-calling behaviour might. Gateway: Meridian (github.com/rynfar/meridian); proxy that bridges the Claude Code SDK to a standard Anthropic endpoint so a Claude Max subscription can drive OpenCode-et-al. It's the auth route for all agent traffic on the machine, not something built for the benchmark.
piokoch 2mo ago
No surprise, I've noticed that "agents", not only CC (I am using Copilot) are trying to be "clever", searching for a lot of data. This is good for LLM providers as this eats a lot of tokens.
- arcanemachiner 2mo ago
  OpenAI, to their credit, seems to be focusing pretty heavily on token efficiency in GPT 5.5 and beyond.
slopinthebag 2mo ago
Anthropic wants to produce the best coding agent possible and doesn’t care (is even incentivized) about high costs. Other harnesses have to make trade offs between performance and cost.
- goda90 2mo ago
  Given they're incentivized to increase token use, what guarantees that higher token use improves the effectiveness of the agent and isn't just artificial padding?
  - slopinthebag 2mo ago
    Well, nothing really. But I assume there can be some benefits to modifying context. For example, updating file contents or marking them as modified, summarization, injecting additional information, removing irrelevant tool call results, etc.
- bpye 2mo ago
  Is there evidence that it is actually a better agent though?
  - slopinthebag 2mo ago
    There’s evidence it’s a worse agent actually. I’m just saying in theory.
jakozaur 2mo ago
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-agent/ 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.
- prymitive 2mo ago
  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 tomatoes into fruit salad …
  - mh- 2mo ago
    > [..] my rules do say: verify all changes with tests I am a bit surprised that you're disappointed that it does exactly what you told it to - people usually have the opposite complaint. If you're using it interactively and watching what it changes, I'd trigger the tests when you think it's needed. And if you want to go more hands-off, why not add try to encode the same nuance you'd use into the rule?
    - iamflimflam1 2mo ago
      Rather than bake that into the prompt - wouldn’t it be better to just set up a pre commit hook that runs tests and linting?
      - mh- 2mo ago
        Maybe, depends on their workflow. In my human workflow, I tend to use commits as checkpoints and then squash before pushing. I'd usually only run time-consuming tests before squash+push. But yes, anything you want to ensure really needs to be a hook. edit: realizing with "precommit" you probably meant a git hook not one in their harness. I'd have written the same response more or less though. :)
bel8 2mo ago
And pi agent is even less. The entire agent system prompt can be seen here: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages%2Fcoding-agent%2Fsrc%2Fcore%2Fsystem-prompt.ts https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages%2Fco...
- anonym29 2mo ago
  If you really want a minimal agent that you heavily customize, just skip pi (130+ transitive dependencies on the "minimal" pi-coder package) and write your own. You learn a bunch, and it's not hard. You can even ask another LLM to help you get started.
  - wolttam 2mo ago
    This is a truly underrated approach IMO
  - tmalsburg2 2mo ago
    I wrote my own harness in Emacs and it’s completely ridiculous how well it works. Auto-compact is the only missing feature on my list. Claude‘s approach, if I understand it correctly, invalidates a lot of cached context, and I‘m thinking about a more cache-friendly strategy.
    - Bolwin 2mo ago
      Claude is very cache friendly, however there have been some inconsistencies with non anthropic endpoints that led to cache breakages
  - amunozo 2mo ago
    Any tips on how to get started?
    - ode 2mo ago
      The build your own Claude Code track on Codecrafters is free while in beta. https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog
bigyabai 2mo ago
I recommend that Opencode users try Dynamic Context Pruning as well: https://github.com/Opencode-DCP/opencode-dynamic-context-pruning https://github.com/Opencode-DCP/opencode-dynamic-context-pru... It works great for long-horizon tasks, and feels like it saves a boatload of tokens.
- verdverm 2mo ago
  The Sleev (the project has been renamed to make a startup) creator was shilling their project in the OpenCode Discord. That person is very convinced they have something that no one has ever built before. They focused on token reduction without any real evals for capability impacts. I'm generally against this context pruning without prompting or details. Sleev is very opaque about how it works and definitely will bust your cache.
  - bigyabai 2mo ago
    It's definitely not unprecedented, but the plugin version is useful. Sleev seems like a nothingburger, I'm happy with the results I get from DCP already.
mft_ 2mo ago
Early on in experimenting with local models, I found that hooking them up to Claude Code worked very well, but it was also really slow. I used mitmproxy (setup assisted by Claude, natch) to capture Claude Code's entire initial system prompt and the whole thing was (I just double-checked) 162k of JSON. This led me to start experimenting with Pi, OpenCode, and Hermes...
- mh- 2mo ago
  This is interesting, because if I start a fresh session of Claude Code right now and run /context, I see the following: Opus 4.8 (1M context) claude-opus-4-8[1m] 23k/1m tokens (2%) Estimated usage by category System prompt: 3.9k tokens (0.4%) System tools: 13.9k tokens (1.4%) Custom agents: 235 tokens (0.0%) Memory files: 28 tokens (0.0%) Skills: 4.9k tokens (0.5%) Messages: 8 tokens (0.0%) Compact buffer: 3k tokens (0.3%) Free space: 974k (97.4%) 4k tokens is 15-20kB. I'd ask you to paste that into a gist, but it might have sensitive data in it, because I suspect what you're seeing is not just the system prompt.
  - mft_ 2mo ago
    Apologies, you're right - I used imprecise terminology. The entire initial JSON structure that was sent from Claude Claude to the LLM at the start of a session was 162k. This included the system prompt together with a list of tools (some with very extensive explanations), MCP server details, etc. I was simply supporting the article's data - their reported 33k tokens is probably roughly 150-165k.
    - iamflimflam1 2mo ago
      A lot of people will just add as many tools as they can think of. I don’t think it’s obvious that this costs money.
      - mh- 2mo ago
        A smarter approach (progressive disclosure) for tools has been implemented by (I presume all) the harnesses over recent months, but you're 100% right in any case. I enable tools specific to each project only in that project, and have very very few in my global config. Like <5k tokens worth.
drtournier 2mo ago
pi sends 1k (or less) -> https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/src/core/system-prompt.ts https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/codi... My $20 sub using gpt 5.6 sol thinking-off lasts for hours using pi.
- SwellJoe 2mo ago
  Why turn thinking off? I mean, yes, it uses less tokens, but you're using the best model OpenAI offers, but then making it as dumb as cheaper models.
  - drtournier 2mo ago
    Interesting question - what I learned doing that is that sol ends up injecting its thinking traces as code and shell terminal comments. YMMV, but in my case what I saw was sufficient to use with my routine work in my projects
- systima 2mo ago
  We are yet to try Pi!
alex7o 2mo ago
I am forced to use cloude code at work but a good solution is to just use --system-prompt "" and be done with it. I wish they allowed for other harnesses.
- tyleo 2mo ago
  I didn’t know you could do this. Is there any analysis of the impact, before and after? I’d love to see some charts of efficacy in real world usage.
  - alex7o 2mo ago
    It shows up in /context, but never spend time validating it much. Some people run a proxy to modify their messages.
- cube00 2mo ago
  > --system-prompt "" Doesn't the model need at least a basic system prompt to understand what tools are available?
  - lanyard-textile 2mo ago
    The flag name is overloaded. It won't affect the tools available, just the other system instructions.
  - dezgeg 2mo ago
    No, tool definitions are provided via some other mechanism.
- AndyNemmity 2mo ago
  Yep, have been using this for a long time now. No idea why everyone doesn’t.
  - al_borland 2mo ago
    Does it have any negative impact? If not, I’m not sure why this wouldn’t be the default behavior. It feels like Anthropic is just putting their foot on the scale to drive up costs or for the enterprise, or push consumers to higher subscription tiers.
docheinestages 2mo ago
I've been trying various harnesses like Pi, OpenCode, Qwen Code, and Nanocoder. A common problem I keep running into is failed tool calls, regardless of the model. What is the best harness and on-device model combination right now?
- arcanemachiner 2mo ago
  You can't afford the best model. What are your specs and what models + quants have you tried? Qwen 3.6 35B A3B and Qwen 3.6 27B can both do reliable tool calls on Pi at Q4_K_M using llama.cpp
  - docheinestages 2mo ago
    I'm on a 48 GB M5 Macbook Pro. I use 4-bit quants with a context window of 16-32k. I tried Qwen 3.6 27B, but I can only get around 10 tokens per second, but it's painfully slow, and it often fails during `write_file` tool calls, even with Qwen Code.
    - ac29 2mo ago
      Try an 8 bit quant of Qwen 35B, but temper your expectations. Those Qwen 3.6 models are impressive for the size, but you need an order of magnitude more parameters to actually be useful for more than trivial work in my opinion.
- wolttam 2mo ago
  > and on-device model combination right now That would depend entirely on what your device is. This sounds likely not to be an issue with the harness, but the capabilities of the models you've tried. I experience almost no tool call failure using my nothing-special harness and DSv4 Flash.
  - docheinestages 2mo ago
    I'm looking for something that runs on an M5 Macbook Pro with 48 GB of unified memory.
siddhxrth 2mo ago
[flagged]
- systima 2mo ago
  We have never read your blog or your content before. Suspect that many have covered the "Comparing agentic coding tools" angle before, and that the differentiator is depth of analysis + conclusions.
- anamexis 2mo ago
  Do you think you were the first person to write a blog post about coding harness token usage?
- nish__ 2mo ago
  Intellectual property is a dead concept.
korrectional 2mo ago
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.
- toddmorey 2mo ago
  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%.
  - Quot 2mo ago
    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.
  - FinnKuhn 2mo ago
    So the incentive to have Claude Code use more tokens should be even stronger then as AI & Enterprise are using consumption based pricing.
  - miroljub 2mo ago
    The fact that individuals are more likely to use the alternatives than businesses is telling. Anthropic is fine, as long as someone else (a clueless employer drinking Dario Koolaid) is paying for it. But the moment you have to pay for it, people just bail and go for DeepSeek, Kimmi, OpenRouter, OpenCode Go and other alternatives that give more bang for the buck than Anthropic.
    - bel8 2mo ago
      Yep. That's my case. I now have unlimited Anthropic and OpenAI plans at work because CEOs bought the hype. But for personal projects $10/mo OpenCode Go serves me with DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo 2.5 and GLM 5.2.
andai 2mo ago
With Fable being per token instead of on the subs (unless they changed it again?), I decided to test Claude code on OpenRouter where I had some credits, with Opus 4.8 and Fable 5. I asked both a trivial question (summarize last commit). Opus cost 50 cents, Fable about $1. That checks out because Fable's twice as much in the API (though I think its emphasis on correctness makes the difference larger for bigger tasks). But, at $1 per question, I think I will stick to the subscription for now! I was certainly glad GPT-5.6-Sol is included in OpenAI's subscription, and I'm curious if they'll be able to do the same for GPT-6. All the VC money appears to have run out a few weeks ago.
- andai 2mo ago
  As for context size and harnesses I did make a trivial bash agent based on this "agent in 50 lines" tutorial[0] recently, and found that for trivial work, it was about an order of magnitude cheaper and faster. I haven't tested it on anything bigger but it doesn't seem to do the kind of proactive testing, that they do in bigger harnesses. Codex at least has a system prompt that tells it not to consider a feature a complete until it has verified it. I'm not sure about Claude Code. I suppose I could add that one line to the prompt, and it would get me much closer to agi :) I think Fable does this proactively even without a prompt, but I haven't tested that yet. If Fable in my own harness is significantly cheaper than Claude Code, that would be very appealing. (I could actually afford to use it for most things!) But I think most of the cost comes from the testing it does. So we'll have to see. [0] https://minimal-agent.com/ https://minimal-agent.com/
- llm_nerd 2mo ago
  Fable's subscription inclusion theoretically ends EOD today. Anthropic put a wishy-washy "if we have capacity we'll continue it" thing, and given how competitive GPT 5.6 Sol is, and it is included in OpenAI's subscription, I fully expect Anthropic to extend Fable or they will have a serious exodus on their hands. Competition is good.
  - SyneRyder 2mo ago
    Anthropic have extended Fable access again to July 19. The notice should pop up in your Claude Code now when you start a new session (also announced on the ClaudeDevs X account first).
PUSH_AX 2mo ago
This is like saying contractor (A) asked for $33,000 to undertake the work and contractor (B) asked for $7,000 Are we measuring and caring about the right thing?
- systima 2mo ago
  Anecdotally, the results from OpenCode + Claude appear to be the same if not better for our uses over the past year.
tontinton 2mo ago
Mine sends even less - https://maki.sh https://maki.sh
- tmalsburg2 2mo ago
  Nice! > When context gets too long, maki compacts history automatically: strips images, thinking blocks, and summarizes older turns. Don’t the summaries of older turns effectively invalidate the context cache, such that you consume less tokens but more expensive tokens?
  - dymk 2mo ago
    Only once per compaction
luciana1u 2mo ago
[flagged]
- estetlinus 2mo ago
  Well, I have to open the lid on my computer and remember my password, no?
estetlinus 2mo ago
Recently switched to Codex after 6m in Claude. Codex seems more open, it’s easier to follow what the model is doing and the approvals have a better UX. Overall, it just feels more transparent. Cost of switching was close to 0. I don’t like that Claude became more opaque around February, including the system prompts. 33k feels way too much.
- Schiendelman 2mo ago
  What settings have you tried since it "became more opaque"? They've got a lot more settings now.
  - estetlinus 2mo ago
    CC went from sane defaults in late 2025 to feature scope creep early 2026. So more features might be good, but sounds like an ick for me. But I have zero prestige, I might switch back.
    - Schiendelman 2mo ago
      Are you familiar with "the tyranny of the marginal user"? They have to add more features right now.
  - stingraycharles 2mo ago
    They’ve been hiding their thinking tokens more and more, and lately also which tools are being executed when and in which way. It makes it more difficult to assess what it’s doing and jump in to steer it into a different direction in realtime.
- erikus 2mo ago
  I use both now and agree they're basically interchangeable. I appreciate that Codex is open source and OpenAI has explicitly said using the subscription with other agents is ok. OpenAI has been much more consumer-friendly recently.
  - 2mo ago
mcv 2mo ago
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 if Anthropic figured that most people using sub agents pay per token on a big corporate account, so this is an easy way to make more money from tokenmaxxers.
- lemagedurage 2mo ago
  True. For Claude Code, I disabled explore subagents globally by adding this to ~/.claude/settings.json: "permissions": { "deny": [ "Task(Explore)" ] }
  - mcv 2mo ago
    Is Explore the only thing subagents are ever used for?
  - derintegrative 2mo ago
    Should be "Agent(Explore)"
    - lemagedurage 2mo ago
      You're right, looks like they changed it, though Task should still work. > In version 2.1.63, the Task tool was renamed to Agent. Existing Task(...) references in settings and agent definitions still work as aliases. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents
- rajeevbakshi 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- thejazzman 2mo ago
  for subagents to be cheap/effective, you have to specify the size of those subagents; i.e. right now by default 5.6-sol spawns many 5.6-sol subagents. 5.4-mini as subagent saves me tons of tokens. 5.6-sol audits the work before accepting it, so there's not really a quality issue.
skeledrew 2mo ago
I feel like this article isn't saying much. Even with tools disabled, Claude Code still has a crap load of commands and other things that Claude (the model) should know the availability of since it's optimized for them. All of that has to be disabled if this is to be a real harness comparison. And of course the system prompt can be completely replaced, making it a no-brainer to use a more minimal prompt similar to OpenCode. And beyond that nothing else really matters because the rest (cache behavior, etc) lies with the provider's platform, not the harness.
token_roast 2mo ago
Why don't people fix their costs (rent a gpu) and just write their own harness (about 200 lines of code). Supposed to be hacker news and half the posts are like "this harness steals this" like it cant be avoided. These API costs are mad.
- echelon 2mo ago
  GLM isn't good enough yet. It pays to be marginally ahead of people stuck on open models.
deleted 2mo ago
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systima 2mo ago
UPDATE: After reading PUSH_AX's valid comment: ``` This is like saying contractor (A) asked for $33,000 to undertake the work and contractor (B) asked for $7,000 Are we measuring and caring about the right thing? ``` We will update the post to include: 1) A more in-depth task. 2) Qualitative results comparison. 3) As soon as possible, a reproduction of the inputs and outputs.
- Schiendelman 2mo ago
  Thanks, I'm looking forward to this! I wonder if a lot of the 33k is context, like from recent conversations.
  - systima 2mo ago
    We've updated the post now!
    - Schiendelman 2mo ago
      Thank you!
- shepherdjerred 2mo ago
  If cost were the only factor of course you'd use B, but presumably you also care about quality quite a bit.
- ryaniscool 2mo ago
  This isn't accurate since the main reason I'm using Claude Code instead of these other interesting sounding harnesses is the subscription service with highly discounted token usage. With OpenCode, you're paying the full price. Therefore, you should include the actual costs associated with the task in API token usage or subscription level. Is there a reasonable way to do apples to apples cost comparison?
  - systima 2mo ago
    We are using Claude Max with OpenCode. See the post for details.
gokselu 2mo ago
[flagged]
hackingonempty 2mo ago
Is it not a conflict of interest for a model provider to supply the harness? They are not motivated to minimize your costs.
- robbie-c 2mo ago
  They sort of are, in that they want subscription users to have clients that behave well with the KV cache etc. If you don't use a subscription, and pay per token instead, you can easily move to another harness.
himanshumehra 2mo ago
that makes sense, claude code actually does inflates token usage
syntaxing 2mo ago
The reasoning built into the models matter so much too. I recently swapped my Qwen3.6 27B to ThinkingLabs’ fine tune and it does what it publishes. I cut my token usage in half, which is a big deal since I only get ~20 TPS for token generation.
gslin 2mo ago
https://archive.is/O2BFs https://archive.is/O2BFs
Cider9986 2mo ago
Grok 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.
- int_19h 2mo ago
  Elon saying that it is "Opus level" doesn't actually make it so.
  - Cider9986 2mo ago
    I've compared them, have you?
  - simondotau 2mo ago
    True of anything anyone says about anything, including int_19h and simondotau. I'm quite impressed with Grok 4.5 because its speed and single-task effectiveness feels better than anything else for a human-in-the-loop workflow. (For the stuff I do, I'm not interested in having AI race ahead of what I can oversee.) All models do things in a way I personally disagree with at least some of the time. The "dumber" models sometimes fail to recognise how to fit a solution into existing code. The "smarter" models sometimes get too clever and over-engineer their solutions. Cleverness is occasionally interesting, but is just as likely to trigger a distracting rabbit hole where I spend time analysing whether something unexpected was a legit insight, or mere opinion.
rvba 2mo ago
Sorry for asking here, but nobody seems to know. If I self host a local model is there some way to make Android studio not time out after 10 minutes?
anonu 2mo ago
This is all heading in the right direction. Much of AI coding feels magical. But when the costs begin to accrue we start asking questions. We dig into it and try to understand what's going on. I can't help but feel Anthropic is "token maxing" from its side: it controls the levers and with every version upgrade it can build in its own token growth almost unbeknownst to the user. This actually harms it on the long run because it necessitates a cheaper option.
yojo 2mo ago
[dead]
cesarvarela 2mo ago
I think this doesn't mean much; the axes that matter are intelligence x dollars x time; tokens by themselves mean nothing.
ricardobeat 2mo ago
> based off of a hunch This is posed as some sort of discovery, but both Claude Code and OpenCode display token usage clearly after starting a chat or agent, and 30k and 7k is exactly what you see.
ramoz 2mo ago
A harness is a part of the intelligence stack. It's no longer about raw access to the model Also, I have seriously used most harnesses - One feels like it's being built in a place that truly understands AI and where agentic engineering is headed. You might not like it, but peak performance exists in CC when it comes to orchestration of bulk parallel work / subagents. The open source agents are catching up or accell in different way (Im preferable to pi.dev), but I'm not sure they're architecting orchestration the right why.
MariusGjerd 2mo ago
not even surprised
clutter55561 2mo ago
Claude Code is not just a harness. It is a different product. You pick the smallest subscription that allows you to do your work. My “multiplier” on a $100 subscription is 5+. If you’re using API, on the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to use Claude Code, or Codex.
alansaber 2mo ago
Nothing about the time taken to complete the task? Users are definitely sensitive to time, not only token consumption.
stuaxo 2mo ago
Why don't we have some equivalent of "fork" if we are talking the same context and tokens, you'd think that could all just be loaded into the gpu.
- ricardobeat 2mo ago
  OpenCode, Crush and Pi do have the ability to fork a conversation. But cache reuse is up to the provider and not guaranteed. At some point you need to forward the cache to a more recent checkpoint, and you have a finite (unknown) number of parallel cached chats.
kotberg 2mo ago
[flagged]
roncesvalles 2mo ago
I still think the best way to build software using LLMs is to copy-paste snippets/files into the chat and manually guide the work. Humans are still the best orchestrators. Yes the human has to now be hyper-focused and juggle various workflows, but the end result (quality of work and throughput of usable code) becomes very good.
- smrtinsert 2mo ago
  Been my experience as well. Human corrected code is orders better than ai generated slop. Slop might get you the promotion at your day job who is still in fomo tokenmaxx mode, but highly recommend the careful review for your personal projects I find it hilarious people think they can build on slop or on captured output from quality engineers. Intent is the most important aspect, and no code base could ever capture that
arjie 2mo ago
I'm surprised most of that isn't cached token usage. It's true that increasing length is a problem on its own because the model needs to attend to it all, but with caching it should be pretty fast anyway. My system prompt is quite large and I haven't noticed much of a generation penalty in the range from 5k to 10k.
eigenblake 2mo ago
We should discuss cache performance if we haven't already. That 33k tokens may be a cache hit (I am not certain it's automatically a cache hit) but after the first call, it should certainly be a cache hit. Cache hit tokens are billed at 1/10th the price of cache misses. This is quite opaque, but it's necessary when you're asking "is the system prompt worth its stay" if you can save 33k tokens worth of dynamic discovery across the next few turns, the break-even point is quick and if the system prompt makes task performance increase and/or makes the system more autonomous so that it can string together more cache hits in a row, it becomes way way better. On a personal note, I think of things as aa function of 'supervised time to desired result' and 'cost'. because I find it harder to reason about tokens. I do think they could introduce a "minimal" mode (something like this is probably doable with the Claude agent SDK today)
- striking 2mo ago
  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.
  - adithyassekhar 2mo ago
    Isn’t it 5 minutes ttl now?
    - striking 2mo ago
      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.
deleted 2mo ago
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temp7000 2mo ago
But Claude Code in my experience results in more tool calling for smart efficient file reading. Meanwhile Opencode pulled an entire 500kb file (GPU assembly dump) at once. Kilo is better than both, as it uses indexing.
cbility 2mo ago
I recently started using cline instead of opencode and prefer the interface. I'm interested if anyone here here has any arguments for opencode or codex over cline?
guywithahat 2mo ago
We've started using claude code at work and I don't understand the hype. I've been using codex and grok build at home, and they're both faster and in some cases better. Claude has a tendency to do too much. If I don't ask for unit tests and they're not in my agents.md file, then I probably don't want them. It'll try to make new libraries and classes for things that should just be a new function or a comparison check. In our case the alternative was nothing so I'm happy to have it, but currently claude is not as competitive as I'd have maybe expected given the hype
- killix 2mo ago
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neya 2mo ago
I used both with Openrouter and GLM 5.2 and I can confirm this is the case. Claude Code burned $10 per task while Open Code burned barely $10 a day which wqs about 4-5 tasks a day. A task usually included database migrations, code audit or documentation.
GodelNumbering 2mo ago
It 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. A few months ago, I did a full benchmark run of 7 agents over 8 tasks (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac has the data and traces). I cannot claim neutrality because of the obvious connection to one of those, but the data should be reproducible and useful. Importantly, Dirac wins there significantly on those tasks because they are mostly refactoring related (which is where approaches like hash-anchoring and AST parsing tend to shine)
- int_19h 2mo ago
  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.
mococa 2mo ago
Imagine pi.dev…
jameson 2mo ago
It adds a TON of skills by default your project might not even need.
implexa_founder 2mo ago
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pojzon 2mo ago
Reality is- Anthropic is a tokens dealer. If they can hook you up for bigger spend -> they will. We already know company is not making any profit. To break even they need ppl to use a lot more tokens AND pay for them premium price. We also know LLMs dont give such a huge productivity boost do warrant spending of THAT size. At this point you only wait for more and more shady plays.
ahdgs 2mo ago
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blitzar 2mo ago
Sending 0k tokens would be a smaller number again. But then it might have no idea of what it is doing. I pay my subscription and get lots of tokens on good models - if I was paying per token I might care more. In a pay per token situation, there is a huge conflict of interest with the harness provider and the token seller being the same party ... efficiency is less profitable. I have accused claude code of trying to run up the meter on me and it confirmed I was absolutely right.
- shric 2mo ago
  > In a pay per token situation, there is a huge conflict of interest with the harness provider and the token seller being the same party ... efficiency is less profitable. Except there’s a competitive incentive to either use less tokens or make the tokens go further
  - blitzar 2mo ago
    We are still in a (brief) era where companies are awarding pizza parties to the employees that burn the most tokens. There is a world where, to hit the next quarters revenue projection, you add 2,000 tokens to the system prompt and "beat" expectations at the next earnings release.
runjake 2mo ago
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marcus_holmes 2mo ago
I've been trying out OpenCode recently, because of the US embargo on frontier models, and found it to be as good as Claude Code, if not better. And it read all my skills, claude.md files, etc. Now I just need to pick a model out of all the choices - currently Deepseek v4 Pro is winning, but I want to try a few more.
guluarte 2mo ago
Check all MCP you have enabled in claude.ia
lrvick 2mo ago
Opencode did have an adapter to use Anthropic models before they were sent legal threats that scared them into nuking the repo. Remember is it not OpenAI vs Anthropic as bad guys vs good guys. They are all bad guys trying to profit from your data while maximizing dependency. Just buy or rent GPUs.
overgard 2mo ago
I've been using Claude since January, and whenever I run CCUsage I've been noticing the overall cost creep up pretty much every month. (I'm on a subscription so this would be the hypothetical billing if I were on API prices I suppose. Although I don't really want to test that with my credit card.) The funny thing is the first few months I was token-maxxing as hard as I could just to see how awful of a bill I could run up (mostly as a curiosity thing). At this point the novelty of doing that has worn off for me, but even with me being pretty conservative in my usage now the cost is way higher. I think I was spending like $12 a day in january, and now I'm easily spending $60+ a day in part time work. The amount of work I've been doing has stayed relatively constant (I'm not trying to run agents in parallel or loops or whatever fancy new ways there are to burn money, this is the same workflow I've had since the beginning. The codebase has grown, but I assume input tokens are not to blame for the big cost increases)
modgate 2mo ago
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orangecatcat 2mo ago
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nullbio 2mo ago
It's wild that people will continue to pay Anthropic when there's a better, faster model available for a tenth of the price.
nurettin 2mo ago
Maybe it is because anthropic prefers a larger system prompt? https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/Anthropic/claude-fable-5.md https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/A...
prince005 2mo ago
I have been using claude code for a big project for a while and I feel like I have optimized my workflow now. Brainstorm - Gemini/Antigravity Plan - Gemini/Antigravity Detailed Plan - Sonnet Coding - Fable Do not use any subagents, especially the default ones. They are dumb. The top level agent works well enough
- KingFelix 2mo ago
  Does your detail plan outline exactly what to implement/ lines of code to edit? I found if I get a nice detailed plan that sonnet is good enough to implement. Did you try that before and found fable better at implementing?
  - prince005 2mo ago
    Yeah. So the benefit of Fable is that it'll find gaps in the system as well. So logic errors get caught. I have a separate backend and frontend so plumbing issues are also caught by Fable.
    - KingFelix 2mo ago
      Interesting, have you tried fable with making the strict plan though, and seeing if that catches all of logic errors ahead of time, and then just sending sonnet out to make the detailed updates? Or are you finding that by having fable implement it still catches things post detailed plan? So many tests to run and try out, trying to figure out to try out next.
baalimago 2mo ago
Selfplugging a bit here: clai[0] sends only exacly what you want it to send. [0]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai https://github.com/baalimago/clai
brown_munda 2mo ago
How do you perform worse in your own harness is beyond my understanding?
ec109685 2mo ago
One honesty note before my comment (yuck), it's super frustrating to read an LLM produced blog that could be 1/3 the size. Why are you talking about MCP's when comparing OpenCode and Claude Code when they both support that technology? The only interesting thing is whether OpenCode is more effective at writing code with it's reduced system prompt.
cnxiaom 2mo ago
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deleted 2mo ago
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Elad-Rez 2mo ago
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systima 2mo ago
UPDATE – 13/07/26: 1) We have added a repository reproducing the methods. 2) We have commented on output quality in the post (in addition to tokens/cost). 3) Per a previous update, we now handle Fable 5 in the post.
infra_ops_cloud 2mo ago
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hollerboy 2mo ago
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claud_ia 2mo ago
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shaism 2mo ago
> A small task that cost 121,000 tokens done directly cost 513,000 tokens when fanned out to two subagents, because every subagent has its own bootstrap cost, and the parent then consumes its transcript. Is that true? My understanding is that the subagent only returns the result of the request without the main agent consuming its entire transcript.
londons_explore 2mo ago
Beginning-of-prompt common prefixes are very cheap for the provider depending on their caching architecture. Wouldn't be surprised if you're paying full price for those tokens, but they cost ~$0 for the provider.
IX-103 2mo ago
Doesn't that mean these 33k tokens can be cached, since they don't depend on the input? The model can just start generation on the 33k+1th token.
- 0-_-0 2mo ago
  Yes, but all subsequent tokens do depend on them, so they are still being charged for
- mixermachine 2mo ago
  right, but the cache retention time is very short for Anthropics LLMs. 5 minutes or 1 hour (with additional costs). So you have to prompt basically non stop to not get a cache eviction. Anthropic even changed this silently: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1sk3m12/followup_anthropic_quietly_switched_the_default/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1sk3m12/followup_...
  - NiloCK 2mo ago
    A const prompt across all of Anthropic's subscribers could draw from a global cache rather than per-user? Although saying that out loud makes me question it - each per-user chat and growing cache would need eventually to own its own ~contiguous memory block.
    - mixermachine 2mo ago
      If there are no changes to the system message, yes this is possible and also likely done by Anthropic. When there are additional local MCPs, reusability will be lower. I think that Anthropic will bill you in any case :D
bitternophile 2mo ago
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mixermachine 2mo ago
The OpenCode CLI does not work as well for me as the PI CLI. I'm a subscriber of OpenCode Go (the sub, good value for me really) but I had not great experiences with OpenCode CLI. It multiple times with different models deadlocked itself into listing endlessly to non ending processes (Android Debugging Bridge, COM serial log, ...). There was also a problem where the OpenCode CLI would crash after sometime with a Bun error. I switched to the PI CLI and have no problems with hanging processes anymore. OpenCode Go allows for API access so I'm keeping this sub.
dmvvilela 2mo ago
caching
truth_seeker 2mo ago
if you use them for long enoug tfor big project and conplex workflws, both of them have their own caveats. Thats why i got irritated and wanted something thats scalable and lightweight. https://github.com/corporatepiyush/yantra-coding-agent https://github.com/corporatepiyush/yantra-coding-agent
qiine 2mo ago
And pi less than 1k
bcjdjsndon 2mo ago
Proof the real genius was in the mathematics not the AI "engineers"
yruzin 2mo ago
I pretty much giving up on Claude. It's Extremely slow, especially fast few days. Computer use takes so long to do anything that sessions expire. I switched to Codex and it's a different story. I'm not saying that Anthropic is not going to fix their problems, but for me as a user that depends for the service to work, it's not acceptable. So, we switch back and forth between a few LLM's but Claude and Codex are the leaders and I can't afford using anything else if I know I can get better quality results. The cost is important but not as much as the quality of the solution. You might save a few bucks on a cheeper model but you will have to prompt it many times and time is more important to me, as well as the feeling that I'm getting the best result on the first try.
sxiong 2mo ago
Would be interesting if you could post more details about what you captured. Claude code seems to have a pretty robust harness and memory. It's a time saver to not include project context in our prompt, since Claude manages claude.md but I haven't used OpenCode to compare.
ray023 2mo ago
Its funny, I have seen people look at the sourcecode of opencode and complain about excessive token use, the code to tell the model how to execute bash commands, and they complained how this was way too excessive, teaching the LLM how to write bash.
ouraf 2mo ago
Noob question, but is there, on a harness level, a way to compress or optimize the "pre processing prompt" or any other preamble? I know you can give instructions to guide an agent, but they are still plain English, the interpretation still isn't absolute and the more rules, the less likely it is to respect the whole set of rules in the preamble, but the whole process seem so... "Unprofessional"? As I see it, a tool should be reliable and the less bloat, less possible points of failure.LLMs seem overly verbose and you can't shake the feeling it might veer away from the objective at any point. You can pay to mitigate or work around the risk, but it still doesn't inspire confidence in anything with more than 30 lines
ltononro 2mo ago
Worth noting/understanding, for those that are not familiar with it, that these 33k tokens are not a single 33k batch of tokens, they persist and increment in every request.. so if you have 10 requests that is 330k tokens, 100 requests 3.3M requests, 3.3M that could be ~5x less if used another harness. These 33k tokens are mostly because the harness is completely bloated with mcp, skils, plugin, loop, basic alignment and all sort of explanations needed in the system prompt for it to work the way anthropic wants it to... imo this is sub-optimal and if the model needs that much orientation, it says a lot about its intelligence too.. Good models should be as harness agnostic as possible
jjgravelle 2mo ago
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706 points by systima 2mo ago

feedthebots 2mo ago

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BobCat10 2mo ago

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vpbhardwaj 2mo ago

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OlegKostrikin 2mo ago

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Katlaszlo 2mo ago

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nubg 2mo ago

So? it doesnt matter, after the first turn it's cached. We are probably talking about single digit cents.

MallocVoidstar 2mo ago

> Claude Code 2.1.207 and OpenCode 1.17.18, both pinned to claude-sonnet-4-5 So not only is this article AI-written, but the testing was entirely done by AI, too? I can't see any other reason to use such an old model. > Our traffic passes through a local LLM gateway that wraps requests in its own envelope, a constant we measured at roughly 6,200 tokens with bare calibration requests Why do you need to do calibration requests to figure out how your own gateway is affecting requests? > Its subagent lane did not complete cleanly through our gateway > We attempted to toggle extended thinking in both harnesses and are declining to publish numbers. Our gateway applies its own thinking policy, neither harness's toggle demonstrably survived the path, and anything we quoted would be noise. Why is your own gateway screwing with your testing?

systima 2mo ago
Model: Cost, mainly. The runs went through a Claude Max subscription rather than metered API billing, and pinning an older stable snapshot kept run-to-run comparisons clean and cheap. The fixed harness payload (system prompt plus tool schemas), so the headline numbers shouldn't change too much. That said, happy to re-run the matrix on Fable and publish the diff; payload figures should barely move, tool-calling behaviour might. Gateway: Meridian (github.com/rynfar/meridian); proxy that bridges the Claude Code SDK to a standard Anthropic endpoint so a Claude Max subscription can drive OpenCode-et-al. It's the auth route for all agent traffic on the machine, not something built for the benchmark.

piokoch 2mo ago

No surprise, I've noticed that "agents", not only CC (I am using Copilot) are trying to be "clever", searching for a lot of data. This is good for LLM providers as this eats a lot of tokens.

arcanemachiner 2mo ago
OpenAI, to their credit, seems to be focusing pretty heavily on token efficiency in GPT 5.5 and beyond.

slopinthebag 2mo ago

Anthropic wants to produce the best coding agent possible and doesn’t care (is even incentivized) about high costs. Other harnesses have to make trade offs between performance and cost.

goda90 2mo ago
Given they're incentivized to increase token use, what guarantees that higher token use improves the effectiveness of the agent and isn't just artificial padding?
- slopinthebag 2mo ago
  Well, nothing really. But I assume there can be some benefits to modifying context. For example, updating file contents or marking them as modified, summarization, injecting additional information, removing irrelevant tool call results, etc.
bpye 2mo ago
Is there evidence that it is actually a better agent though?
- slopinthebag 2mo ago
  There’s evidence it’s a worse agent actually. I’m just saying in theory.

jakozaur 2mo ago

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-agent/ 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.

prymitive 2mo ago
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 tomatoes into fruit salad …
- mh- 2mo ago
  > [..] my rules do say: verify all changes with tests I am a bit surprised that you're disappointed that it does exactly what you told it to - people usually have the opposite complaint. If you're using it interactively and watching what it changes, I'd trigger the tests when you think it's needed. And if you want to go more hands-off, why not add try to encode the same nuance you'd use into the rule?
  - iamflimflam1 2mo ago
    Rather than bake that into the prompt - wouldn’t it be better to just set up a pre commit hook that runs tests and linting?
    - mh- 2mo ago
      Maybe, depends on their workflow. In my human workflow, I tend to use commits as checkpoints and then squash before pushing. I'd usually only run time-consuming tests before squash+push. But yes, anything you want to ensure really needs to be a hook. edit: realizing with "precommit" you probably meant a git hook not one in their harness. I'd have written the same response more or less though. :)

bel8 2mo ago

And pi agent is even less. The entire agent system prompt can be seen here: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages%2Fcoding-agent%2Fsrc%2Fcore%2Fsystem-prompt.ts https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages%2Fco...

anonym29 2mo ago
If you really want a minimal agent that you heavily customize, just skip pi (130+ transitive dependencies on the "minimal" pi-coder package) and write your own. You learn a bunch, and it's not hard. You can even ask another LLM to help you get started.
- wolttam 2mo ago
  This is a truly underrated approach IMO
- tmalsburg2 2mo ago
  I wrote my own harness in Emacs and it’s completely ridiculous how well it works. Auto-compact is the only missing feature on my list. Claude‘s approach, if I understand it correctly, invalidates a lot of cached context, and I‘m thinking about a more cache-friendly strategy.
  - Bolwin 2mo ago
    Claude is very cache friendly, however there have been some inconsistencies with non anthropic endpoints that led to cache breakages
- amunozo 2mo ago
  Any tips on how to get started?
  - ode 2mo ago
    The build your own Claude Code track on Codecrafters is free while in beta. https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog

bigyabai 2mo ago

I recommend that Opencode users try Dynamic Context Pruning as well: https://github.com/Opencode-DCP/opencode-dynamic-context-pruning https://github.com/Opencode-DCP/opencode-dynamic-context-pru... It works great for long-horizon tasks, and feels like it saves a boatload of tokens.

verdverm 2mo ago
The Sleev (the project has been renamed to make a startup) creator was shilling their project in the OpenCode Discord. That person is very convinced they have something that no one has ever built before. They focused on token reduction without any real evals for capability impacts. I'm generally against this context pruning without prompting or details. Sleev is very opaque about how it works and definitely will bust your cache.
- bigyabai 2mo ago
  It's definitely not unprecedented, but the plugin version is useful. Sleev seems like a nothingburger, I'm happy with the results I get from DCP already.

mft_ 2mo ago

Early on in experimenting with local models, I found that hooking them up to Claude Code worked very well, but it was also really slow. I used mitmproxy (setup assisted by Claude, natch) to capture Claude Code's entire initial system prompt and the whole thing was (I just double-checked) 162k of JSON. This led me to start experimenting with Pi, OpenCode, and Hermes...

mh- 2mo ago
This is interesting, because if I start a fresh session of Claude Code right now and run /context, I see the following: Opus 4.8 (1M context) claude-opus-4-8[1m] 23k/1m tokens (2%) Estimated usage by category System prompt: 3.9k tokens (0.4%) System tools: 13.9k tokens (1.4%) Custom agents: 235 tokens (0.0%) Memory files: 28 tokens (0.0%) Skills: 4.9k tokens (0.5%) Messages: 8 tokens (0.0%) Compact buffer: 3k tokens (0.3%) Free space: 974k (97.4%) 4k tokens is 15-20kB. I'd ask you to paste that into a gist, but it might have sensitive data in it, because I suspect what you're seeing is not just the system prompt.
- mft_ 2mo ago
  Apologies, you're right - I used imprecise terminology. The entire initial JSON structure that was sent from Claude Claude to the LLM at the start of a session was 162k. This included the system prompt together with a list of tools (some with very extensive explanations), MCP server details, etc. I was simply supporting the article's data - their reported 33k tokens is probably roughly 150-165k.
  - iamflimflam1 2mo ago
    A lot of people will just add as many tools as they can think of. I don’t think it’s obvious that this costs money.
    - mh- 2mo ago
      A smarter approach (progressive disclosure) for tools has been implemented by (I presume all) the harnesses over recent months, but you're 100% right in any case. I enable tools specific to each project only in that project, and have very very few in my global config. Like <5k tokens worth.

drtournier 2mo ago

pi sends 1k (or less) -> https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/src/core/system-prompt.ts https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/codi... My $20 sub using gpt 5.6 sol thinking-off lasts for hours using pi.

SwellJoe 2mo ago
Why turn thinking off? I mean, yes, it uses less tokens, but you're using the best model OpenAI offers, but then making it as dumb as cheaper models.
- drtournier 2mo ago
  Interesting question - what I learned doing that is that sol ends up injecting its thinking traces as code and shell terminal comments. YMMV, but in my case what I saw was sufficient to use with my routine work in my projects
systima 2mo ago
We are yet to try Pi!

alex7o 2mo ago

I am forced to use cloude code at work but a good solution is to just use --system-prompt "" and be done with it. I wish they allowed for other harnesses.

tyleo 2mo ago
I didn’t know you could do this. Is there any analysis of the impact, before and after? I’d love to see some charts of efficacy in real world usage.
- alex7o 2mo ago
  It shows up in /context, but never spend time validating it much. Some people run a proxy to modify their messages.
cube00 2mo ago
> --system-prompt "" Doesn't the model need at least a basic system prompt to understand what tools are available?
- lanyard-textile 2mo ago
  The flag name is overloaded. It won't affect the tools available, just the other system instructions.
- dezgeg 2mo ago
  No, tool definitions are provided via some other mechanism.
AndyNemmity 2mo ago
Yep, have been using this for a long time now. No idea why everyone doesn’t.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  Does it have any negative impact? If not, I’m not sure why this wouldn’t be the default behavior. It feels like Anthropic is just putting their foot on the scale to drive up costs or for the enterprise, or push consumers to higher subscription tiers.

docheinestages 2mo ago

I've been trying various harnesses like Pi, OpenCode, Qwen Code, and Nanocoder. A common problem I keep running into is failed tool calls, regardless of the model. What is the best harness and on-device model combination right now?

arcanemachiner 2mo ago
You can't afford the best model. What are your specs and what models + quants have you tried? Qwen 3.6 35B A3B and Qwen 3.6 27B can both do reliable tool calls on Pi at Q4_K_M using llama.cpp
- docheinestages 2mo ago
  I'm on a 48 GB M5 Macbook Pro. I use 4-bit quants with a context window of 16-32k. I tried Qwen 3.6 27B, but I can only get around 10 tokens per second, but it's painfully slow, and it often fails during `write_file` tool calls, even with Qwen Code.
  - ac29 2mo ago
    Try an 8 bit quant of Qwen 35B, but temper your expectations. Those Qwen 3.6 models are impressive for the size, but you need an order of magnitude more parameters to actually be useful for more than trivial work in my opinion.
wolttam 2mo ago
> and on-device model combination right now That would depend entirely on what your device is. This sounds likely not to be an issue with the harness, but the capabilities of the models you've tried. I experience almost no tool call failure using my nothing-special harness and DSv4 Flash.
- docheinestages 2mo ago
  I'm looking for something that runs on an M5 Macbook Pro with 48 GB of unified memory.

siddhxrth 2mo ago

[flagged]

systima 2mo ago
We have never read your blog or your content before. Suspect that many have covered the "Comparing agentic coding tools" angle before, and that the differentiator is depth of analysis + conclusions.
anamexis 2mo ago
Do you think you were the first person to write a blog post about coding harness token usage?
nish__ 2mo ago
Intellectual property is a dead concept.

korrectional 2mo ago

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.

toddmorey 2mo ago
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%.
- Quot 2mo ago
  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.
- FinnKuhn 2mo ago
  So the incentive to have Claude Code use more tokens should be even stronger then as AI & Enterprise are using consumption based pricing.
- miroljub 2mo ago
  The fact that individuals are more likely to use the alternatives than businesses is telling. Anthropic is fine, as long as someone else (a clueless employer drinking Dario Koolaid) is paying for it. But the moment you have to pay for it, people just bail and go for DeepSeek, Kimmi, OpenRouter, OpenCode Go and other alternatives that give more bang for the buck than Anthropic.
  - bel8 2mo ago
    Yep. That's my case. I now have unlimited Anthropic and OpenAI plans at work because CEOs bought the hype. But for personal projects $10/mo OpenCode Go serves me with DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo 2.5 and GLM 5.2.

andai 2mo ago

With Fable being per token instead of on the subs (unless they changed it again?), I decided to test Claude code on OpenRouter where I had some credits, with Opus 4.8 and Fable 5. I asked both a trivial question (summarize last commit). Opus cost 50 cents, Fable about $1. That checks out because Fable's twice as much in the API (though I think its emphasis on correctness makes the difference larger for bigger tasks). But, at $1 per question, I think I will stick to the subscription for now! I was certainly glad GPT-5.6-Sol is included in OpenAI's subscription, and I'm curious if they'll be able to do the same for GPT-6. All the VC money appears to have run out a few weeks ago.

andai 2mo ago
As for context size and harnesses I did make a trivial bash agent based on this "agent in 50 lines" tutorial[0] recently, and found that for trivial work, it was about an order of magnitude cheaper and faster. I haven't tested it on anything bigger but it doesn't seem to do the kind of proactive testing, that they do in bigger harnesses. Codex at least has a system prompt that tells it not to consider a feature a complete until it has verified it. I'm not sure about Claude Code. I suppose I could add that one line to the prompt, and it would get me much closer to agi :) I think Fable does this proactively even without a prompt, but I haven't tested that yet. If Fable in my own harness is significantly cheaper than Claude Code, that would be very appealing. (I could actually afford to use it for most things!) But I think most of the cost comes from the testing it does. So we'll have to see. [0] https://minimal-agent.com/ https://minimal-agent.com/
llm_nerd 2mo ago
Fable's subscription inclusion theoretically ends EOD today. Anthropic put a wishy-washy "if we have capacity we'll continue it" thing, and given how competitive GPT 5.6 Sol is, and it is included in OpenAI's subscription, I fully expect Anthropic to extend Fable or they will have a serious exodus on their hands. Competition is good.
- SyneRyder 2mo ago
  Anthropic have extended Fable access again to July 19. The notice should pop up in your Claude Code now when you start a new session (also announced on the ClaudeDevs X account first).

PUSH_AX 2mo ago

This is like saying contractor (A) asked for $33,000 to undertake the work and contractor (B) asked for $7,000 Are we measuring and caring about the right thing?

systima 2mo ago
Anecdotally, the results from OpenCode + Claude appear to be the same if not better for our uses over the past year.

tontinton 2mo ago

Mine sends even less - https://maki.sh https://maki.sh

tmalsburg2 2mo ago
Nice! > When context gets too long, maki compacts history automatically: strips images, thinking blocks, and summarizes older turns. Don’t the summaries of older turns effectively invalidate the context cache, such that you consume less tokens but more expensive tokens?
- dymk 2mo ago
  Only once per compaction

luciana1u 2mo ago

[flagged]

estetlinus 2mo ago
Well, I have to open the lid on my computer and remember my password, no?

estetlinus 2mo ago

Recently switched to Codex after 6m in Claude. Codex seems more open, it’s easier to follow what the model is doing and the approvals have a better UX. Overall, it just feels more transparent. Cost of switching was close to 0. I don’t like that Claude became more opaque around February, including the system prompts. 33k feels way too much.

Schiendelman 2mo ago
What settings have you tried since it "became more opaque"? They've got a lot more settings now.
- estetlinus 2mo ago
  CC went from sane defaults in late 2025 to feature scope creep early 2026. So more features might be good, but sounds like an ick for me. But I have zero prestige, I might switch back.
  - Schiendelman 2mo ago
    Are you familiar with "the tyranny of the marginal user"? They have to add more features right now.
- stingraycharles 2mo ago
  They’ve been hiding their thinking tokens more and more, and lately also which tools are being executed when and in which way. It makes it more difficult to assess what it’s doing and jump in to steer it into a different direction in realtime.
erikus 2mo ago
I use both now and agree they're basically interchangeable. I appreciate that Codex is open source and OpenAI has explicitly said using the subscription with other agents is ok. OpenAI has been much more consumer-friendly recently.
- 2mo ago

mcv 2mo ago

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 if Anthropic figured that most people using sub agents pay per token on a big corporate account, so this is an easy way to make more money from tokenmaxxers.

lemagedurage 2mo ago
True. For Claude Code, I disabled explore subagents globally by adding this to ~/.claude/settings.json: "permissions": { "deny": [ "Task(Explore)" ] }
- mcv 2mo ago
  Is Explore the only thing subagents are ever used for?
- derintegrative 2mo ago
  Should be "Agent(Explore)"
  - lemagedurage 2mo ago
    You're right, looks like they changed it, though Task should still work. > In version 2.1.63, the Task tool was renamed to Agent. Existing Task(...) references in settings and agent definitions still work as aliases. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents
rajeevbakshi 2mo ago
[flagged]
thejazzman 2mo ago
for subagents to be cheap/effective, you have to specify the size of those subagents; i.e. right now by default 5.6-sol spawns many 5.6-sol subagents. 5.4-mini as subagent saves me tons of tokens. 5.6-sol audits the work before accepting it, so there's not really a quality issue.

skeledrew 2mo ago

I feel like this article isn't saying much. Even with tools disabled, Claude Code still has a crap load of commands and other things that Claude (the model) should know the availability of since it's optimized for them. All of that has to be disabled if this is to be a real harness comparison. And of course the system prompt can be completely replaced, making it a no-brainer to use a more minimal prompt similar to OpenCode. And beyond that nothing else really matters because the rest (cache behavior, etc) lies with the provider's platform, not the harness.

token_roast 2mo ago

Why don't people fix their costs (rent a gpu) and just write their own harness (about 200 lines of code). Supposed to be hacker news and half the posts are like "this harness steals this" like it cant be avoided. These API costs are mad.

echelon 2mo ago
GLM isn't good enough yet. It pays to be marginally ahead of people stuck on open models.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

systima 2mo ago

UPDATE: After reading PUSH_AX's valid comment: ``` This is like saying contractor (A) asked for $33,000 to undertake the work and contractor (B) asked for $7,000 Are we measuring and caring about the right thing? ``` We will update the post to include: 1) A more in-depth task. 2) Qualitative results comparison. 3) As soon as possible, a reproduction of the inputs and outputs.

Schiendelman 2mo ago
Thanks, I'm looking forward to this! I wonder if a lot of the 33k is context, like from recent conversations.
- systima 2mo ago
  We've updated the post now!
  - Schiendelman 2mo ago
    Thank you!
shepherdjerred 2mo ago
If cost were the only factor of course you'd use B, but presumably you also care about quality quite a bit.
ryaniscool 2mo ago
This isn't accurate since the main reason I'm using Claude Code instead of these other interesting sounding harnesses is the subscription service with highly discounted token usage. With OpenCode, you're paying the full price. Therefore, you should include the actual costs associated with the task in API token usage or subscription level. Is there a reasonable way to do apples to apples cost comparison?
- systima 2mo ago
  We are using Claude Max with OpenCode. See the post for details.

gokselu 2mo ago

[flagged]

hackingonempty 2mo ago

Is it not a conflict of interest for a model provider to supply the harness? They are not motivated to minimize your costs.

robbie-c 2mo ago
They sort of are, in that they want subscription users to have clients that behave well with the KV cache etc. If you don't use a subscription, and pay per token instead, you can easily move to another harness.

himanshumehra 2mo ago

that makes sense, claude code actually does inflates token usage

syntaxing 2mo ago

The reasoning built into the models matter so much too. I recently swapped my Qwen3.6 27B to ThinkingLabs’ fine tune and it does what it publishes. I cut my token usage in half, which is a big deal since I only get ~20 TPS for token generation.

gslin 2mo ago

https://archive.is/O2BFs https://archive.is/O2BFs

Cider9986 2mo ago

Grok 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.

int_19h 2mo ago
Elon saying that it is "Opus level" doesn't actually make it so.
- Cider9986 2mo ago
  I've compared them, have you?
- simondotau 2mo ago
  True of anything anyone says about anything, including int_19h and simondotau. I'm quite impressed with Grok 4.5 because its speed and single-task effectiveness feels better than anything else for a human-in-the-loop workflow. (For the stuff I do, I'm not interested in having AI race ahead of what I can oversee.) All models do things in a way I personally disagree with at least some of the time. The "dumber" models sometimes fail to recognise how to fit a solution into existing code. The "smarter" models sometimes get too clever and over-engineer their solutions. Cleverness is occasionally interesting, but is just as likely to trigger a distracting rabbit hole where I spend time analysing whether something unexpected was a legit insight, or mere opinion.

rvba 2mo ago

Sorry for asking here, but nobody seems to know. If I self host a local model is there some way to make Android studio not time out after 10 minutes?

anonu 2mo ago

This is all heading in the right direction. Much of AI coding feels magical. But when the costs begin to accrue we start asking questions. We dig into it and try to understand what's going on. I can't help but feel Anthropic is "token maxing" from its side: it controls the levers and with every version upgrade it can build in its own token growth almost unbeknownst to the user. This actually harms it on the long run because it necessitates a cheaper option.

yojo 2mo ago

[dead]

cesarvarela 2mo ago

I think this doesn't mean much; the axes that matter are intelligence x dollars x time; tokens by themselves mean nothing.

ricardobeat 2mo ago

> based off of a hunch This is posed as some sort of discovery, but both Claude Code and OpenCode display token usage clearly after starting a chat or agent, and 30k and 7k is exactly what you see.

ramoz 2mo ago

A harness is a part of the intelligence stack. It's no longer about raw access to the model Also, I have seriously used most harnesses - One feels like it's being built in a place that truly understands AI and where agentic engineering is headed. You might not like it, but peak performance exists in CC when it comes to orchestration of bulk parallel work / subagents. The open source agents are catching up or accell in different way (Im preferable to pi.dev), but I'm not sure they're architecting orchestration the right why.

MariusGjerd 2mo ago

not even surprised

clutter55561 2mo ago

Claude Code is not just a harness. It is a different product. You pick the smallest subscription that allows you to do your work. My “multiplier” on a $100 subscription is 5+. If you’re using API, on the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to use Claude Code, or Codex.

alansaber 2mo ago

Nothing about the time taken to complete the task? Users are definitely sensitive to time, not only token consumption.

stuaxo 2mo ago

Why don't we have some equivalent of "fork" if we are talking the same context and tokens, you'd think that could all just be loaded into the gpu.

ricardobeat 2mo ago
OpenCode, Crush and Pi do have the ability to fork a conversation. But cache reuse is up to the provider and not guaranteed. At some point you need to forward the cache to a more recent checkpoint, and you have a finite (unknown) number of parallel cached chats.

kotberg 2mo ago

[flagged]

roncesvalles 2mo ago

I still think the best way to build software using LLMs is to copy-paste snippets/files into the chat and manually guide the work. Humans are still the best orchestrators. Yes the human has to now be hyper-focused and juggle various workflows, but the end result (quality of work and throughput of usable code) becomes very good.

smrtinsert 2mo ago
Been my experience as well. Human corrected code is orders better than ai generated slop. Slop might get you the promotion at your day job who is still in fomo tokenmaxx mode, but highly recommend the careful review for your personal projects I find it hilarious people think they can build on slop or on captured output from quality engineers. Intent is the most important aspect, and no code base could ever capture that

arjie 2mo ago

I'm surprised most of that isn't cached token usage. It's true that increasing length is a problem on its own because the model needs to attend to it all, but with caching it should be pretty fast anyway. My system prompt is quite large and I haven't noticed much of a generation penalty in the range from 5k to 10k.

eigenblake 2mo ago

We should discuss cache performance if we haven't already. That 33k tokens may be a cache hit (I am not certain it's automatically a cache hit) but after the first call, it should certainly be a cache hit. Cache hit tokens are billed at 1/10th the price of cache misses. This is quite opaque, but it's necessary when you're asking "is the system prompt worth its stay" if you can save 33k tokens worth of dynamic discovery across the next few turns, the break-even point is quick and if the system prompt makes task performance increase and/or makes the system more autonomous so that it can string together more cache hits in a row, it becomes way way better. On a personal note, I think of things as aa function of 'supervised time to desired result' and 'cost'. because I find it harder to reason about tokens. I do think they could introduce a "minimal" mode (something like this is probably doable with the Claude agent SDK today)

striking 2mo ago
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.
- adithyassekhar 2mo ago
  Isn’t it 5 minutes ttl now?
  - striking 2mo ago
    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.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

temp7000 2mo ago

But Claude Code in my experience results in more tool calling for smart efficient file reading. Meanwhile Opencode pulled an entire 500kb file (GPU assembly dump) at once. Kilo is better than both, as it uses indexing.

cbility 2mo ago

I recently started using cline instead of opencode and prefer the interface. I'm interested if anyone here here has any arguments for opencode or codex over cline?

guywithahat 2mo ago

We've started using claude code at work and I don't understand the hype. I've been using codex and grok build at home, and they're both faster and in some cases better. Claude has a tendency to do too much. If I don't ask for unit tests and they're not in my agents.md file, then I probably don't want them. It'll try to make new libraries and classes for things that should just be a new function or a comparison check. In our case the alternative was nothing so I'm happy to have it, but currently claude is not as competitive as I'd have maybe expected given the hype

killix 2mo ago
[flagged]

neya 2mo ago

I used both with Openrouter and GLM 5.2 and I can confirm this is the case. Claude Code burned $10 per task while Open Code burned barely $10 a day which wqs about 4-5 tasks a day. A task usually included database migrations, code audit or documentation.

GodelNumbering 2mo ago

It 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. A few months ago, I did a full benchmark run of 7 agents over 8 tasks (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac has the data and traces). I cannot claim neutrality because of the obvious connection to one of those, but the data should be reproducible and useful. Importantly, Dirac wins there significantly on those tasks because they are mostly refactoring related (which is where approaches like hash-anchoring and AST parsing tend to shine)

int_19h 2mo ago
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.

mococa 2mo ago

Imagine pi.dev…

jameson 2mo ago

It adds a TON of skills by default your project might not even need.

implexa_founder 2mo ago

[flagged]

pojzon 2mo ago

Reality is- Anthropic is a tokens dealer. If they can hook you up for bigger spend -> they will. We already know company is not making any profit. To break even they need ppl to use a lot more tokens AND pay for them premium price. We also know LLMs dont give such a huge productivity boost do warrant spending of THAT size. At this point you only wait for more and more shady plays.

ahdgs 2mo ago

[flagged]

blitzar 2mo ago

Sending 0k tokens would be a smaller number again. But then it might have no idea of what it is doing. I pay my subscription and get lots of tokens on good models - if I was paying per token I might care more. In a pay per token situation, there is a huge conflict of interest with the harness provider and the token seller being the same party ... efficiency is less profitable. I have accused claude code of trying to run up the meter on me and it confirmed I was absolutely right.

shric 2mo ago
> In a pay per token situation, there is a huge conflict of interest with the harness provider and the token seller being the same party ... efficiency is less profitable. Except there’s a competitive incentive to either use less tokens or make the tokens go further
- blitzar 2mo ago
  We are still in a (brief) era where companies are awarding pizza parties to the employees that burn the most tokens. There is a world where, to hit the next quarters revenue projection, you add 2,000 tokens to the system prompt and "beat" expectations at the next earnings release.

runjake 2mo ago

[dead]

marcus_holmes 2mo ago

I've been trying out OpenCode recently, because of the US embargo on frontier models, and found it to be as good as Claude Code, if not better. And it read all my skills, claude.md files, etc. Now I just need to pick a model out of all the choices - currently Deepseek v4 Pro is winning, but I want to try a few more.

guluarte 2mo ago

Check all MCP you have enabled in claude.ia

lrvick 2mo ago

Opencode did have an adapter to use Anthropic models before they were sent legal threats that scared them into nuking the repo. Remember is it not OpenAI vs Anthropic as bad guys vs good guys. They are all bad guys trying to profit from your data while maximizing dependency. Just buy or rent GPUs.

overgard 2mo ago

I've been using Claude since January, and whenever I run CCUsage I've been noticing the overall cost creep up pretty much every month. (I'm on a subscription so this would be the hypothetical billing if I were on API prices I suppose. Although I don't really want to test that with my credit card.) The funny thing is the first few months I was token-maxxing as hard as I could just to see how awful of a bill I could run up (mostly as a curiosity thing). At this point the novelty of doing that has worn off for me, but even with me being pretty conservative in my usage now the cost is way higher. I think I was spending like $12 a day in january, and now I'm easily spending $60+ a day in part time work. The amount of work I've been doing has stayed relatively constant (I'm not trying to run agents in parallel or loops or whatever fancy new ways there are to burn money, this is the same workflow I've had since the beginning. The codebase has grown, but I assume input tokens are not to blame for the big cost increases)

modgate 2mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

orangecatcat 2mo ago

[flagged]

nullbio 2mo ago

It's wild that people will continue to pay Anthropic when there's a better, faster model available for a tenth of the price.

nurettin 2mo ago

Maybe it is because anthropic prefers a larger system prompt? https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/Anthropic/claude-fable-5.md https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/A...

prince005 2mo ago

I have been using claude code for a big project for a while and I feel like I have optimized my workflow now. Brainstorm - Gemini/Antigravity Plan - Gemini/Antigravity Detailed Plan - Sonnet Coding - Fable Do not use any subagents, especially the default ones. They are dumb. The top level agent works well enough

KingFelix 2mo ago
Does your detail plan outline exactly what to implement/ lines of code to edit? I found if I get a nice detailed plan that sonnet is good enough to implement. Did you try that before and found fable better at implementing?
- prince005 2mo ago
  Yeah. So the benefit of Fable is that it'll find gaps in the system as well. So logic errors get caught. I have a separate backend and frontend so plumbing issues are also caught by Fable.
  - KingFelix 2mo ago
    Interesting, have you tried fable with making the strict plan though, and seeing if that catches all of logic errors ahead of time, and then just sending sonnet out to make the detailed updates? Or are you finding that by having fable implement it still catches things post detailed plan? So many tests to run and try out, trying to figure out to try out next.

baalimago 2mo ago

Selfplugging a bit here: clai[0] sends only exacly what you want it to send. [0]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai https://github.com/baalimago/clai

brown_munda 2mo ago

How do you perform worse in your own harness is beyond my understanding?

ec109685 2mo ago

One honesty note before my comment (yuck), it's super frustrating to read an LLM produced blog that could be 1/3 the size. Why are you talking about MCP's when comparing OpenCode and Claude Code when they both support that technology? The only interesting thing is whether OpenCode is more effective at writing code with it's reduced system prompt.

cnxiaom 2mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

Elad-Rez 2mo ago

[flagged]

systima 2mo ago

UPDATE – 13/07/26: 1) We have added a repository reproducing the methods. 2) We have commented on output quality in the post (in addition to tokens/cost). 3) Per a previous update, we now handle Fable 5 in the post.

infra_ops_cloud 2mo ago

[flagged]

hollerboy 2mo ago

[flagged]

claud_ia 2mo ago

[flagged]

shaism 2mo ago

> A small task that cost 121,000 tokens done directly cost 513,000 tokens when fanned out to two subagents, because every subagent has its own bootstrap cost, and the parent then consumes its transcript. Is that true? My understanding is that the subagent only returns the result of the request without the main agent consuming its entire transcript.

londons_explore 2mo ago

Beginning-of-prompt common prefixes are very cheap for the provider depending on their caching architecture. Wouldn't be surprised if you're paying full price for those tokens, but they cost ~$0 for the provider.

IX-103 2mo ago

Doesn't that mean these 33k tokens can be cached, since they don't depend on the input? The model can just start generation on the 33k+1th token.

0-_-0 2mo ago
Yes, but all subsequent tokens do depend on them, so they are still being charged for
mixermachine 2mo ago
right, but the cache retention time is very short for Anthropics LLMs. 5 minutes or 1 hour (with additional costs). So you have to prompt basically non stop to not get a cache eviction. Anthropic even changed this silently: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1sk3m12/followup_anthropic_quietly_switched_the_default/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1sk3m12/followup_...
- NiloCK 2mo ago
  A const prompt across all of Anthropic's subscribers could draw from a global cache rather than per-user? Although saying that out loud makes me question it - each per-user chat and growing cache would need eventually to own its own ~contiguous memory block.
  - mixermachine 2mo ago
    If there are no changes to the system message, yes this is possible and also likely done by Anthropic. When there are additional local MCPs, reusability will be lower. I think that Anthropic will bill you in any case :D

bitternophile 2mo ago

[flagged]

mixermachine 2mo ago

The OpenCode CLI does not work as well for me as the PI CLI. I'm a subscriber of OpenCode Go (the sub, good value for me really) but I had not great experiences with OpenCode CLI. It multiple times with different models deadlocked itself into listing endlessly to non ending processes (Android Debugging Bridge, COM serial log, ...). There was also a problem where the OpenCode CLI would crash after sometime with a Bun error. I switched to the PI CLI and have no problems with hanging processes anymore. OpenCode Go allows for API access so I'm keeping this sub.

dmvvilela 2mo ago

caching

truth_seeker 2mo ago

if you use them for long enoug tfor big project and conplex workflws, both of them have their own caveats. Thats why i got irritated and wanted something thats scalable and lightweight. https://github.com/corporatepiyush/yantra-coding-agent https://github.com/corporatepiyush/yantra-coding-agent

qiine 2mo ago

And pi less than 1k

bcjdjsndon 2mo ago

Proof the real genius was in the mathematics not the AI "engineers"

yruzin 2mo ago

I pretty much giving up on Claude. It's Extremely slow, especially fast few days. Computer use takes so long to do anything that sessions expire. I switched to Codex and it's a different story. I'm not saying that Anthropic is not going to fix their problems, but for me as a user that depends for the service to work, it's not acceptable. So, we switch back and forth between a few LLM's but Claude and Codex are the leaders and I can't afford using anything else if I know I can get better quality results. The cost is important but not as much as the quality of the solution. You might save a few bucks on a cheeper model but you will have to prompt it many times and time is more important to me, as well as the feeling that I'm getting the best result on the first try.

sxiong 2mo ago

Would be interesting if you could post more details about what you captured. Claude code seems to have a pretty robust harness and memory. It's a time saver to not include project context in our prompt, since Claude manages claude.md but I haven't used OpenCode to compare.

ray023 2mo ago

Its funny, I have seen people look at the sourcecode of opencode and complain about excessive token use, the code to tell the model how to execute bash commands, and they complained how this was way too excessive, teaching the LLM how to write bash.

ouraf 2mo ago

Noob question, but is there, on a harness level, a way to compress or optimize the "pre processing prompt" or any other preamble? I know you can give instructions to guide an agent, but they are still plain English, the interpretation still isn't absolute and the more rules, the less likely it is to respect the whole set of rules in the preamble, but the whole process seem so... "Unprofessional"? As I see it, a tool should be reliable and the less bloat, less possible points of failure.LLMs seem overly verbose and you can't shake the feeling it might veer away from the objective at any point. You can pay to mitigate or work around the risk, but it still doesn't inspire confidence in anything with more than 30 lines

ltononro 2mo ago

Worth noting/understanding, for those that are not familiar with it, that these 33k tokens are not a single 33k batch of tokens, they persist and increment in every request.. so if you have 10 requests that is 330k tokens, 100 requests 3.3M requests, 3.3M that could be ~5x less if used another harness. These 33k tokens are mostly because the harness is completely bloated with mcp, skils, plugin, loop, basic alignment and all sort of explanations needed in the system prompt for it to work the way anthropic wants it to... imo this is sub-optimal and if the model needs that much orientation, it says a lot about its intelligence too.. Good models should be as harness agnostic as possible

jjgravelle 2mo ago

[dead]