[eigenblake]

We should discuss cache performance if we haven't already. That 33k tokens may be a cache hit (I am not certain it's automatically a cache hit) but after the first call, it should certainly be a cache hit. Cache hit tokens are billed at 1/10th the price of cache misses. This is quite opaque, but it's necessary when you're asking "is the system prompt worth its stay" if you can save 33k tokens worth of dynamic discovery across the next few turns, the break-even point is quick and if the system prompt makes task performance increase and/or makes the system more autonomous so that it can string together more cache hits in a row, it becomes way way better. On a personal note, I think of things as aa function of 'supervised time to desired result' and 'cost'. because I find it harder to reason about tokens. I do think they could introduce a "minimal" mode (something like this is probably doable with the Claude agent SDK today)

[striking]

Anthropic's cache expires after 1 hour when using subscription endpoints, and for those cached tokens cache reads are free. It's generous (compared to API pricing) but it's not 100% free.

[adithyassekhar]

Isn’t it 5 minutes ttl now?

[striking]

I believe it's 5 minutes on API pricing by default, though you can turn off caching or force it to 1 hour. Subscriptions are special, seemingly because Anthropic doesn't want to expose casual users to all of the tokenomics.