alt Hacker NewsThis isn’t limited to large system prompts. Coding-agent harnesses are also becoming more aggressive about using tools, even for trivial requests. In our tests, prompts such as “Hey” or “commit” sometimes triggered 30+ tool calls:
https://quesma.com/blog/the-true-cost-of-saying-hi-to-an-ai-...
Tokenflation seems very real: the number of tokens consumed by simple tasks keeps increasing.
Replies
what • today at 9:47 PM
Why are you asking the LLM to commit? Can’t you do that yourself?
Chris2048 • today at 7:28 PM
> prompts such as “Hey” or “commit” sometimes triggered 30+ tool calls
I read that this is because it wastes time looking through past conversations and other context to figure one what you might want it to do - a less ambiguous prompt would be better.
I often find myself annoyed when Opus fixes a typo in a comment and decides to run tests, lints and whenever else it can find to run. Often it will start by stashing current changes just to preemptively check if all tests were passing before. And I can blame myself a bit because my rules do say: verify all changes with tests. But as there is that I in AI that is hyped which you’d think means it knows not to put tomatoes into fruit salad …