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

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

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.

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.

that makes sense, claude code actually does inflates token usage

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

I recommend that Opencode users try Dynamic Context Pruning as well: 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.

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.