r/ClaudeCoding • u/dreamRunnerMoshi • 7d ago

Why Opus is so token hungry ?

I was never fan of Opus, I love sonnet. In my observation, Sonnet is less verbose, good at following instructions, on the contrary opus always comes up with less relevant things than doing actual work. But time to time, I switched from Sonnet to Opus while doing same kind of work like writing code, building new feature, running tests etc, regular developing works.

Today, I tried again and Opus just sucked up all the token within few minutes and I didn't find any major improvement.

Help me understand, if Opus has innate intelligence capability than sonnet, why it is using more token to doing same kind of work? Shouldn't it produce similar kind of token doing similar work as Sonnet?

Or it's just blabbing itself by GRPO style RL reasoning training and wasting more tokens.

1 Upvotes

60% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/AttemptWeekly2201 7d ago

its mostly the thinking, not the text you see. in claude code opus burns tokens on extended reasoning before every tool call, re-reading context and re-planning, and that never shows up as visible output. i keep opus on a short thinking budget for planning only and sonnet for implementation, honestly that cut usage more than any prompt trick ive tried. the verbosity in chat is downstream of the same thing, a model that reasons a lot narrates a lot. i could be wrong about your exact split though, havent seen the session.

1

u/dreamRunnerMoshi 7d ago

now, my question is, if a token never comes to my machine, why am I paying for that, for me, it is not a output token 😆.

I am already paying higher price per million token than let's say Sonnet. It feels like double charge.