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What a task costs on Opus 5.5
Anthropic's guide to optimizing Claude Opus 5.5 costs emphasizes session longevity and intelligent effort management.
What: The guide explains how input/output token pricing, caching strategies, and 'effort levels' impact the cost of agentic coding sessions.
Why it matters: Understanding the mechanics of token usage and cache hits is becoming a critical skill for developers integrating AI agents into long-running development workflows.
Takeaway: Run /usage at the end of your Claude Code sessions to analyze token spend; try 'medium' effort for daily work and reserve 'high' for when the model stalls.
Deep dive
- Cache hit rate: Keeping a session steady maximizes cache usage, which costs 95% less than fresh input tokens.
- Effort levels: Higher effort settings increase reasoning tokens per turn but can save money by preventing expensive re-tries and multi-turn loops.
- Prompt auditing: Using
/claude-api prompt-auditcan remove repetitive or contradictory instructions that inflate token usage. - Compaction: Running
/compactperiodically can prune irrelevant historical context, reducing the token count sent on every turn.
Decoder
- Cache reads: Previously processed tokens that are stored and reused, costing a fraction of standard input tokens.
- Claude Code: Anthropic's CLI-based agent for executing coding tasks.
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