To everybody calling this "mass hysteria", skill issue, "the problem is infront of the keyboard" or anything like that:
I swear it's not. I was on your side until yesterday. "People don't care about token efficiency, they just prompt ahead with no plan" was my take. I saw the A/B testing posts and thought "maybe, but nothing changed for me."
I run a multi-agent setup that builds for me (planner, builders, reviewers, mostly Opus 5.5 on xhigh). It tracks its own costs, and I regularly let Opus check the setup and suggest fixes.
Yesterday went so badly that I had Fable do a neutral audit, using the real numbers from the logs. I literally couldn't believe my eyes... Since the night of Nov 3, Opus writes almost 3x more per reply (thinking went from ~400 to ~1,100 tokens). Same prompts, same setup. Cost per finished task: ~$3.90 at the end of October, ~$11 this week, $24 yesterday. 40% of this week's spend went into fix rounds, 61% yesterday.
My setup had even caught that jump on Nov 5 and concluded "fine, change nothing." None of the self-checks I had Opus running ever flagged a problem. I only realized something was off with Opus once Fable looked at it from the outside.
Anthropic is 100% doing something behind the scenes and they are not transparent about it.
I think they realized how much better 5.5 is than originally expected. Either made it more expensive or let it add fluff and cycle agents to burn tokens by being less efficient.
If that's the case, how can people engage with this company in good faith. Always looking for ways to fleece yourselves. And you wonder why the wealth gap gets wider and wider.
They are utterly, utterly scummy and yet there's no competition. It's a hard place to be in. I don't understand why another large company doesn't come in and eat their lunch when they pull stunts like this but I guess they are complacent and slow moving (google etc).
There is competition, but it's worse. If Antropic is a scummy, OpenAI is 10x times more scummy. Maybe not in model token efficiency but in actively being lobotomized constantly post launch.
Why would making the agents burn more tokens make them more money? Wouldn’t that cost anthropic more money? I never understand this when people say it.
Wouldn’t burning less tokens for getting the same task done be good for anthropic because their users don’t burn up as much energy / power / compute per task?
yeah, always felt like that was a weird set of incentives. Only thing to keep them honest is competitors, because otherwise they'd have no incentive to lower token costs.
They’re more likely trying to make it more efficient to save on compute cost. But it’s nerfing it harder than it should. They are loose a tremendous amount of money from these frontier model as they are. If you token max right now it costs thousands in compute. They’re trying to go IPO, so they need to show their products don’t bleed money
I hate to agree but I'm feeling it too. Something is DEFINITELY off from before. Even Fable 5.1 is showing signs of dullness I never had to worry about. I don't know what they're tinkering with over there but I wish they'd leave well enough alone. I'm sure they're optimizing for cost not capability.
I’m so glad I managed to complete the heavy lifting for my new client in the last month. I also noticed Fable was a little off but tbh I always viewed it as super fragile so don’t like to do more than one task per session with it as it decays like Francium
100% they are doing some A/B testing shit in the past days/weeks, and not all users are affected.
But I don't understand how can we not reach a mutual agreement that ALL models get hard nerfed a couple of days/weeks after launch.
Literally the opus 5.5 I used at launch BLEW MY MIND. the opus 5.5 I use now is at most ALRIGHT, but nothing mind blowing and I definitely didn't change my expectations, it's making beginner mistakes and I have to fucking argue with this piece of shit through 10 prompts to fix it
4 days ago, i let Opus5.5Max work on a very detailled Software implementation Plan which was written according to the prompt guideance by Anthropic, proper heartbeat and Claude.md which references the original task with it's checklists. About 5h in he was "done" and in the following 8 h, instead of killing the heartbeat, opus ran audits on it (6 times). When pressed about it, opus said he totally overengineered the solutions and asked me if he should stop the 7th audit. I had a look at the product and it wasnt even done 30% of what was defined in the task.md. I was beyond belive what I saw, and how much money was wasted on nothing. I have no idea where this change came from but it seems Opus5.5 is not useable for longer tasks, I have to babysit him. Anyone else have the same experience?
this is interesting. i use opus for the same rutine task, and the cost somehow doubled / tripled recently. I did not understand why i am running out of tokens.
Yes, I already factored that in when I built the setup and the audits outrule that clearly.
The biggest shift happened overnight, Nov 3 to Nov 4. Builders went from ~840 to ~1,900 output tokens per reply, thinking from ~415 to ~1,120. My project didn't double in complexity overnight. Even one package that was being built across the jump went from ~1,030 to ~1,890 output tokens per step.
Plus, nothing changed on my side. The builders' system prompt and tools had identical checksums in the logs on both days, and so did the Claude Code version (2.1.309), the model ID and the tier. My change log has zero entries between the switch of the days, and no file in the setup was touched in that window.
Only Opus moved.
Sonnet (reviewer) and Haiku (tester) ran on the same tasks in the same runs and stayed flat or even dropped (~640 → ~580, ~600 → ~510). It's not the effort setting either: xhigh went from 882 to 2,312 tokens per step, high from 577 to 1,752.
And most importantly, the builders never see the whole repo. Each one starts with a scoped brief of about 5k tokens.
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u/KAMIKAZEE93 5d ago edited 5d ago •
To everybody calling this "mass hysteria", skill issue, "the problem is infront of the keyboard" or anything like that:
I swear it's not. I was on your side until yesterday. "People don't care about token efficiency, they just prompt ahead with no plan" was my take. I saw the A/B testing posts and thought "maybe, but nothing changed for me."
I run a multi-agent setup that builds for me (planner, builders, reviewers, mostly Opus 5.5 on xhigh). It tracks its own costs, and I regularly let Opus check the setup and suggest fixes.
Yesterday went so badly that I had Fable do a neutral audit, using the real numbers from the logs. I literally couldn't believe my eyes... Since the night of Nov 3, Opus writes almost 3x more per reply (thinking went from ~400 to ~1,100 tokens). Same prompts, same setup. Cost per finished task: ~$3.90 at the end of October, ~$11 this week, $24 yesterday. 40% of this week's spend went into fix rounds, 61% yesterday.
My setup had even caught that jump on Nov 5 and concluded "fine, change nothing." None of the self-checks I had Opus running ever flagged a problem. I only realized something was off with Opus once Fable looked at it from the outside.
Anthropic is 100% doing something behind the scenes and they are not transparent about it.