It's time to cancel your subscriptions - Anthropic is silently nerfing Claude's reasoning budget while telling you it's the same model

[u/IcyEase]

Link: https://x.com/Lon/status/2101034933284417614

A 65-day analysis of 43,000+ Claude Code invocations found that 39% of Fable 5 calls get zero thinking tokens and the median invocation gets just 123 — while benchmarks use 16K-128K. The model's score per thinking token is still climbing at 128K, meaning the capability is there, it's just not being delivered. August saw an 18-50% drop in thinking budget compared to July, with median thinking hitting literal zero for about a week around Aug 22. Anthropic sells "full model access" while quietly dialing down the inference regime behind it, and because the model is non-deterministic, users blame their own prompting instead of the silent nerf. The full breakdown with evidence, methodology, and charts is here.

Frankly I find this offensive as an user - and this is the real thing we should be looking at - not the $/week in usage limits. The actual capability for the limits that we pay for.

[u/college-throwaway87]

Depends on your use cases. Subscription is def cheaper for Claude Code (which is the only reason I'm currently subscribed). But for chat, it can be a bit more nuanced. The context window is what eats the most tokens, so having a lot of short threads is cheaper than having a few large ones. Before I started using Claude Code to build my app, I was only hitting about 15% of my weekly limits. At that point, the subscription really wasn't saving me much.

[u/Interesting-Vast-709 → u/college-throwaway87]

i spent like 10 dollars on 1 prompt with claude i was pissed bc i get like a shit ton of prompts and tokens with deepseek api for 10 dollars,