Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word status line

Re:Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word stat... by adwn on Thursday October 29, 2026 @02:45AM (#50285308)

That only applies to subscriptions. Enterprise customers pay API rates and therefore per-token. Being wasteful would directly increase Anthropic's profit, assuming they're not selling them at a loss.

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Re:Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word stat... by stavros on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:09AM (#50285855)

You meant to write "being frugal", I think.

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Re:Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word stat... by adwn on Thursday October 29, 2026 @05:22AM (#50286411)

I meant "being wasteful with tokens", as in, Anthropic makes more profit when Claude Code sends many input tokens and requests many output tokens when billing the customer for the API cost.

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Re:Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word stat... by stavros on Thursday October 29, 2026 @05:26AM (#50286433)

Ahh, sorry, my bad.

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Re:Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word stat... by brookst on Thursday October 29, 2026 @08:32AM (#50287910)

As long as price elasticity is zero.

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Re:Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word stat... by NiloCK on Thursday October 29, 2026 @07:17AM (#50287268)

Overall I find this line of thinking pretty dubious. Competition exists. Yes, model provider X can run up my bill by instructing its model to do busywork. But I can easily swap to providers Y, Z, A, B, C.

I happen to find I'm receiving exceptional value from provider X, so I don't switch.

API customers can swap to alternate providers even more easily than subscription customers.

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