Claude Code injects a ton of tools into the system prompt, including their “memory system” that’s like 10k+ tokens. Depending on your task shape, this can easily double your task cost (e.g. a low context-using job that takes many turns, like a monitoring loop).
You should use --disallowed-tools to prune any tools not needed for the task. Note that this is also a perpetual game of whack-a-mole since they’re always adding new tools.
> Claude Code injects a ton of tools into the system prompt
It's so unfortunate they don't let you use the subscription with other harnesses anymore - since even if I used OpenCode they'd still get a bunch of useful data from the API calls, meanwhile I could stretch their tier limits way further.
Subsidized Anthropic subscriptions seem to work fine on the oh-my-pi harness, somehow.
Calling per token usage of the US closed source labs has always been funny to me, we have a clear model of what it actually costs to host these models from open models.
Your subscription is not subsidised, it is just closer to the actual cost of the model…
According to ccusage I use about $5k of tokens on my $100/mo Claude Max plan and only hit 5-hr windows where I have to switch tools for a couple hours about once a week
It's so unfortunate people don't realize it's cheaper to write their own well working agent instead of insisting with general purpose bloated ones like Claude.
200$/month is a lot of money on Luna/DS4 flash, like really a lot and the results are much better than clowning on bloated CC.
It's absurd how you have more and more organizations encoding their processes on LLMs and "engineers" (charlatan coders) don't even bother optimizing the tool they use most.
> the results are much better than clowning on bloated CC.
I won't argue with the cost effectiveness, but the results are very much not better. Opus and Fable are in a different league than DS4 Flash. Even GPT Terra, which I really like overall, sometimes gets stuck in weird loops and starts to do stupid stuff once its context window fills up. Whereas I can more or less trust the big models to just Do The Thing™ on the first try.
With that said, you get way more value out of a GPT subscription than you do from Claude, partly because of the ability to use more efficient harnesses.
The system prompt part is surely cached across all users.
You still pay cache token costs on API calls. Cache cost/token are 90% lower, but you pay it every single turn.
I’m not sure if they let you skip the cache write cost on the first turn. That would imply cross-user caching infrastructure or special casing the default system prompt to give you a discount. Maybe? Away from the computer but you could try a “hello” in a fresh session and see what was billed.
For Anthropic models, yes. But OP was using Claude Code with GPT.
the system prompt still takes up useful space in the context window and steers the model into unnecessary actions and over-thinking patterns
ty re --disallowed-tools
for coding agents 'shell' is often all you need (just make sure the environment has the necessary tools)
appreciate the tip, kind netizen