Claude Code Token Economics: Paying for Opus 5.5's Thoughts

Anthropic's deep dive into what tasks actually cost on Opus 5.5 reveals the unglamorous mechanics of developer token usage. Beyond the headline price cuts—including a 60% reduction on cache reads—the real cost of an AI coding session depends heavily on the number of turns, cache hit rates, and how much the model overthinks your instructions. Every time an agent retries a fix, it resends the entire conversation history, quietly draining your budget.

• Cache management is king: A steady session keeps cache read hit rates high at a fraction of the cost, but a coffee break longer than five minutes or a mid-session model switch will force an expensive cache rewrite.
• Effort levels dictate spend: Adjusting reasoning effort controls how much the model thinks per turn, making it cheaper to stick to medium for daily tasks and reserve high or xhigh for genuine roadblocks.
• Measure your own wreckage: Anthropic's calculators and theoretical benchmarks are nice, but running your own backlog tasks through the /usage command remains the only honest way to check your spend.

Why should I care? Ehhh
Interesting token math for heavy Claude Code users, but hardly an emergency unless your billing alerts are screaming.

Read the original: What a task costs on Opus 5.5