| ▲ | jimmypk 7 hours ago | |
The default effort change in Claude Code is worth knowing before your next session: it's now `xhigh` (a new level between `high` and `max`) for all plans, up from the previous default. Combined with the 1.0–1.35× tokenizer overhead on the same prompts, actual token spend per agentic session will likely exceed naive estimates from 4.6 baselines. Anthropic's guidance is to measure against real traffic—their internal benchmark showing net-favorable usage is an autonomous single-prompt eval, which may not reflect interactive multi-turn sessions where tokenizer overhead compounds across turns. The task budget feature (just launched in public beta) is probably the right tool for production deployments that need cost predictability when migrating. | ||
| ▲ | mwigdahl 6 hours ago | parent [-] | |
That depends a bit on token efficiency. From their "Agentic coding performance by effort level" graph, it looks like they get similar outcome for 4.7 medium at half the token usage as 4.6 at high. Granted that is, as you say, a single prompt, but it is using the agentic process where the model self prompts until completion. It's conceivable the model uses fewer tokens for the same result with appropriate effort settings. | ||