We said a Claude Code subagent costs 436k tokens. A cleaner measurement says 54k — here is what fooled us
This story is from 2026-08-29. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.
Two weeks ago we published a number: a Claude Code subagent costs ~436,000 tokens before it reads a single file. We built routing rules around it, wrote a break-even formula with it, and repeated it in two articles. Today we re-measured with a cleaner method and got 54,154 tokens . The old number w…
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- 2026-08-29 02:17 · DEV Community — AI
We said a Claude Code subagent costs 436k tokens. A cleaner measurement says 54k — here is what fooled us