this benchmark is a very misleading because it doesn't necessarily point to these harnesses saving usage and much of the harness that comes with codex for example is designed at cross functional agentic usage which you will be leaving behind by using a different harness. openai spends a lot of time as does claude. also note that cached is what makes up bulk of the total and codex and claude has huge discounts in that scenario.
the "spamming" is mostly compaction appending files, tool artifacts, images in its summary there is a known github issue for codex. only solution is periodic clean up but its also how a lot of the agentic orchestration is performed and able to work for days.
smol currently is very simple so it definitely does less things, like no subagent orchestration
I will look into how token usage looks like for longer sessions and more complex tasks
re caching: the cache ratio for this bench looks 'bad' for smol because it often finishes a task before caching kicks in (caching starts at 1024 tokens)
thank you for flagging this