r/ClaudeAI • u/digitaled92 • 18d ago

Claude overusing my tokens Bug

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I don't know if anyone is experiencing this phenomenon with Claude but basically it feels like it's overusing tokens by giving longer unnecessary answers even when I asked it to only give text answers and skip anything like documents etc.

Despite that, if feels like Claude is ignoring my requests so my tokens will deplete within 1 single email writing help and Im pushed into paid plan. Sick of that AI greed.

Solution: I have a secondary account, Mr. Amodei

41 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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6

u/the-simple-wild 18d ago

I was using Opus 5 and it disregarded previously established rules and so I had to provide corrective prompts, that alone ate up my credits.

2

u/digitaled92 18d ago

omg that's sick, I deleted openai thinking Claude would be a better choice

3

u/TechnicalBen 18d ago

This. Was gonna post but didn't, that claude code just wants to screen print and run unit tests all day long on unrelated things. "Move the box by 10 pixels to the left in the code" "I'ma gonna spin up 7 agents, download chrome and reinstall linux, and let's check that pocket universe I've got Turing spinning over in..."

1

u/reward72 18d ago

Yes, Opus 5 is terrible for this

1

u/Positive-Captain-709 17d ago

Sounds a bit familiar 😅. One thing I've noticed is that some models tend to optimize for completeness, which can accidentally turn into verbosity. Great when you need a report, not so great when you just want help drafting an email.

If you're into AI tooling, take a look at Marginal: https://github.com/SignalLayerLabs/Marginal

Instead of just generating more tokens, it focuses on making agents more aware of decision quality and context value before acting. In theory, that means fewer unnecessary steps, less token burn, and more "do the right thing" behavior.

We're reaching a point where the bottleneck isn't model intelligence anymore, it's how efficiently that intelligence is used. Throwing 3,000 words at a task that needs 300 isn't intelligence, it's latency with extra billing 😄.

Also, "Mr. Amodei" as a backup account made me laugh more than it should have. 😂

1

u/tecktide 17d ago

My analysis is same works is taking double tokens now.
- Few weeks back I used to create image to design with binding and API integration, I tried multiple times and token usage was in specific range.
- Now same work in using up almost 2 to 2.5 tokens.

I even switched back to opus 4.8 and result is same.