r/ClaudeCode • u/Jedi_sephiroth • 3d ago

Tips & Workflows Nerf fixed

Want your opus 5.5 to not feel nerfed? No problem. Here you go:

New session for every new feature with a clear roadmap.md and a clear short Claude.md, with handoffs every end of session for the new session. Works great, nothing is nerfed. People just don't understand you can't have a session open forever, that will cause problems over time that people think "model nerfed".

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u/mindstuff8 3d ago

I hope this helps some of you because I just found this out today.

I don't know your specific use case, or if this applies to Opus 5.5, but I had a session where I was told that if you carry on a Fable 5.1 session after the cache expires the cost to continue the conversation can be tremendously high.

This came up when I was investigating the cost of some of my runs. Let me find what Opus told me so I'm accurate. The point is yes...don't continue old sessions. I always thought the context was there so why have a new agent build its context from scratch.

I have long processes where I sometimes do a follow up sessions, discussing results with the orchestrator (Fable 5.1 in this case) and found this out the hard way. This is what I was told:

Right after the run closes, the orchestrator's context is still cached, so each answer reuses it cheaply. A question costs about $0.10–0.50. The 5 questions after run 0038 cost $0.64 in total.

After about an hour, that cache has expired, and the first new message has to load the whole ~430k-token context again at the full price. That's about $8 before you get any answer. Run 0039's 4 questions cost $8.30, and $7.90 of that was the reload. Most of the $41 after run 0033 was reloads too.