CONNECT WITH US
AI & Deeptech

AI & Deeptech

A Claude Code skill was eating 200,000 tokens before answering a single question

TheNewStack (LLM) - ArtificialIntelligence logo

Published on

Add as a preferred source on Google
A Claude Code skill was eating 200,000 tokens before answering a single question

A Claude Code skill designed to help developers work with Anthropic’s API was consuming more than 200,000 tokens to load. With Claude Code v2.1.234, Anthropic says it has brought that down to roughly 25,000 tokens.

The change appeared in the Claude Code changelog on Monday. Anthropic attributed the reduction, which cuts the initial context cost by at least 85.7%, to loading the skill’s reference documentation on demand. In this case, a single bundled skill could consume more tokens than many coding sessions do from beginning to end.

The built-in /claude-api skill which loads reference material for developers working with the Claude API and Managed Agents, can be invoked directly, but Claude Code can also activate it when a project imports Anthropic’s Python or TypeScript SDK. Interestingly, developers had already traced the problem before Anthropic documented the fix.

In a GitHub issue opened July 7, a developer examining Claude Code 2.1.201 found that /claude-api embedded its shared reference files and the detected language documentation directly into the skill body. The report measured roughly 120,000 tokens of reference material in a single invocation. One migration document accounted for an estimated 36,000 tokens on its own.

One migration document accounted for an estimated 36,000 tokens on its own.

Once the rest of the skill loaded, even a one-line question could consume roughly 200,000 tokens before Claude started answering — the hidden overhead that, as with production AI pipelines more broadly , only surfaces once someone actually measures it. The issue was closed as a duplicate and marked “not planned,” despite similar reports still coming in.


Source link
Related Topics:AI & Deeptech

Disclaimer

We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We TheMorningPulse.fyi want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It's possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.