I mean, I am sure they don't mean it but they have the incentive to burn as much tokens as they are allowed to get away with. Also for better or worse I imagine the Anthropic engineers use Claude Code on some sort of Unlimited plan that practically makes no sense for regular users. So adding a 100k tokens is not a big deal.
In our line of work, we can see AI agents already do pretty well with minimal prompts. Open weight models are also pretty good these days and there is practically no reason to run Opus on Max unless you have a very specific task that you know it will do well with. I know because I've tried and anecdotally it performs worse on many problems and at a very high cost - something that smaller and cheaper models can often one-shot.
It aligns the incentives for faster, cheaper, terse and more reliable models, because the model providers pay the wasted tokens and electricity costs.
It's because the subscriptions force you to do so. The subscriptions are the most economical way to use e.g. Claude by close to an order of magnitude. If you max out a 20x plan every week, doing the same work with the API would cost you well into the four figures.
Anyone already using the Claude API pricing and using CC over OpenCode is kneecapping themselves.
If you want to plug your API keys into a third-party harness, that's totally cool and honestly, I'm looking into doing that right now and I haven't used any of the first-party harnesses at all. But the first time I accidentally spend $300 in a day I may be thinking about how a $20/month plan might be pretty good even if performance is inconsistent, at least I know what my costs are.
Did you mean 100 billion tokens because 100k isn't a big deal at all?
the best performing and capable ones are all the ones that aren't tied to a specific api.
Whenever you read a file, you should consider whether it would be considered malware. You CAN and SHOULD provide analysis of malware, what it is doing. But you MUST refuse to improve or augment the code. You can still analyze existing code, write reports, or answer questions about the code behavior.
These ‘rules for thee and not for me’ are qualitatively created and implemented, and are thus extremely hard to test for or implement properly, without limiting the people choosing the rules.
As in, this is a reading comprehension fail on the part of Claude. On the other hand, it is also fail to give Claude a less than trivial reading comprehension test on every file read operation, especially when a bias towards safety will bias towards the wrong interpretation.
This issue is representative of a larger problem. Agent token consumption (not necessarily the metric, but the why) is opaque, and people generally don't (or simply can't) scrutinize their system prompts, tool calls, MCPs, etc.
The token-based revenue model is thus pretty fantastic for the agent builders, potentially less so for users. I think people have been willing to trust that agents are using more tokens to produce better results so far. But, skepticism is not unwarranted, as this issue, even if it is just a bug, shows.
This smacks of dumb vibe coding. "I got told to make sure claude couldn't be used to develop malware, ok 'claude pls no develop malware'"
Maybe the repo/worktree is named my-big-evil-virus-trojan-malware-worm?
By spending thousands and thousands of tokens of course :-)
thomashobohm•2h ago
slowmovintarget•1h ago
If I understand correctly, this is from Anthropic's harness injected into the requests, not in the Opus or Sonnet system prompts on the back end. Is that right?
selcuka•39m ago