[hasperdi]

It's not 3x because of 3 runs; can be more token, can be less.

The way of thinking it is, telling Claude to tackle the problem 3 times, each time it may or may not use different approach, fix or improve on things it did previously.

[staticvar]

That's right. However if you use the v3 operator, you get three parallel versions being built, and then combined depending on which resolver you use (pick, merge, and compare).