My boss uses opus and gets good results when I use it always burns tokens. The other way is also true too I get great results with sol/terra but my boss does not.
This has been a recurring problem for me - as a security engineer catasrophization is a fundamental skill to finding vulnerabilities in complex systems, but makes me to conservative when building. For some of my leaders they are much better at saying 'good enough, ship it, and fix it later'.
By contrast, Claude Code's bias to make assumptions of reasonableness about underlying systems has proven to be immensely frustrating over the last month or two, both personally and at work. I've wasted days on "that was my mistake. I've been reporting numbers on the old architecture because I hadn't enabled the new one in the config" both at work and home. It's immensely frustrating.
But here we are. Wrestling with energetic idiots in model form, wrangled by over-specific harnesses that struggle to stay off of deranged side-quests.
What a time to be alive!
“No, not like THAT!”
When I checked, all that credit was gone, I still wasn't into the next 5 hours, and all the agents had failed, returning nothing.
I didn't even get anything for burning all that credit. If I had paid for it, I'd be very, very pissed.
One fine day I was like, oh my weekly quota resets soon, I will kick off an expensive bug hunt. It launched parallel things and burned $10 in like a moment.
It’s scary. I turned off extra usage after that.
"Ultracode. When a system-reminder confirms ultracode is on, that opt-in is standing: author and run a workflow for every substantive task by default. The goal is the most exhaustive, correct answer you can produce — token cost is not a constraint."
gpt 5.5/5.6 goes further on its own much more often than opus 4.8/5 does. codex capped ~300k context when claude does 1m.
I don't feel codex is saving tokens, and result is usually not as good imo.
That's configurable in codex.. but there is a higher cost/usage to using it.