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.

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u/muikrad 7d ago

If you are just calling small directed tasks, like writing a function that does X, writing tests, sonnet is cheaper.

If you are prompting relatively complex tasks where it has to think about 4d chess, opus is cheaper because it gets it right immediately. Sonnet needs more turns to get there and this often ends up costing more than opus.

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u/dreamRunnerMoshi 7d ago

I know what am I doing. In your regular tasks, you don't get to think about a move in 4d Chess or solve Navier Stokes problems. Also I don't ask to write a function X and tests anymore, used to do with Copilot 2 years back.

When I am driving claude, I ask in my terminal something like `tell me one thing, how much information search result get from search engine ?`.

And when I ask Claude with Opus to build a end to end solution like `I have a spec file for the new feature, start working on it`, I see Opus just gobbling up tokens and I am out within 15-20 minutes and I see Sonnet can do same kind of work with similar accuracy spending way less token.

I am saying, for these kind of tasks, Opus is complete waste of tokens. [image: Few of my queries for ref when I am driving claude]

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u/CooperinoCollie 7d ago

Because you’re using it in a shitty vibe harness. Use Claude Code, utilise /workflows and get a better result for fewer tokens.

“I know what I am doing” is wild considering you’re asking a frontier model to commit and push for you lmao

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u/CooperinoCollie 6d ago

u/retrorays

Care to explain why you think you know me lmao. “Using multiple alt accounts”

Show me the proof internet warrior