alt Hacker NewsApologies, you're right - I used imprecise terminology. The entire initial JSON structure that was sent from Claude Claude to the LLM at the start of a session was 162k. This included the system prompt together with a list of tools (some with very extensive explanations), MCP server details, etc.
I was simply supporting the article's data - their reported 33k tokens is probably roughly 150-165k.
Replies
iamflimflam1 • yesterday at 9:28 PM
A lot of people will just add as many tools as they can think of. I don’t think it’s obvious that this costs money.
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mh- • yesterday at 9:35 PM
Ah that makes sense, wasn't trying to be pedantic. Thanks for clarifying.
That’s entirely dependent on how many plugins, MCP tools, agents you have, and if you have pre-filling of all available tools enabled. Best way to avoid unnecessary expense is to avoid it all and use CLI tools instead.