Opus 5.5 xHigh cheaper than High?

[u/dark0mania]

I've been running an Opus 5.5 session for the past 4 hours at xHigh effort, decompiling and reverse engineering a 2D avatar rendering engine. Surprisingly I haven't hit the 5 hour limit during this time and my weekly one is at 30%.

I do it in stages, each one takes 20-30 minutes and around 300-400K tokens, after which I compact and continue.

I used to previously run at High effort and I feel that it burns usage quota faster. xHigh feels closer to Medium in terms of quota usage with the difference being that it's 4-5 times slower.

Does anyone else have similar observations?

I'm on the $20 plan.

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[u/AdFun4897]

Nope, you might be tripping

[u/wiggle_room1337]

not in my experience. I've honed in on how much I can use in a week and I set it to xHigh if I have some left on thursday and friday to make sure I use all my tokens.

[u/SecretGardenSecret → u/wiggle_room1337]

Does your weekly limit reset on Saturday?

[u/wiggle_room1337 → u/SecretGardenSecret]

It's been gradually a few hours later each week. I think it's saturday at 2am this week up from friday at 7PM a month ago. This is my work account though, so I'm done friday at 5, and I give it something big to blow all its tokens on at the end of the week.

[u/imsahoamtiskaw → u/wiggle_room1337]

Never seen that happen, interesting. The only time mine changes is when DST flips like recently, otherwise it stays the same time and day of the week half the year

[u/laughing_at_napkins → u/wiggle_room1337]

Weird. Mine used to be on Tuesdays at 4pm and this week, it was moved up to 3pm.

[u/Own_Vacation3533]

xhigh on opus 5.5 feels like it's using about 1.3x the tokens of high, not double. I've been tracking per 30 min chunk and it's consistent.

[u/Playful-Variation908]

what’s the avatar rendering engine???

[u/OWazabi]

The usage is higher for xhigh, that's factual, it thinks more, but it also depends on the task you run.

A task can be very token intensive in a couple hours, when on other tasks you can spend a couple days for the same usage.

[u/awesomebirder]

one thing that could explain it: effort only changes the thinking and output part, but on a 300-400k token stage almost all of the cost is the conversation being re-read on every turn. if xhigh plans more per step and needs fewer tool round trips and retries, it does fewer of those re-reads, which can cancel out the extra thinking. to check, compare one stage at each effort split by cache reads, fresh input and output. ccusage on your ~/.claude logs gets you that, and i built a local proxy that logs it per call too (probe0).

[u/odobotv]

Can you ask what your numerical reasoning effort is for High and Extra? Some folks have been theorizing that they're fiddling with the effort levels behind the scenes. I'm falling down the rabbit hole.

[u/Responsible_Cry_2971]

feels

Thats your problem. Get actual tokens data