[GodelNumbering]

It is not the raw prompt size that matters ultimately, otherwise Pi (and variants) would be the lowest costing agents. What matters is how efficient the prompt it. Prompt minimalism often gets conflated with efficiency. Having said that, CC does seem bloated for what it does.

What matters even more is tooling quality. Bad/buggy tooling causes a lot more roundtrips that wipes out all gains from initial greedy approach.

A few months ago, I did a full benchmark run of 7 agents over 8 tasks (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac has the data and traces). I cannot claim neutrality because of the obvious connection to one of those, but the data should be reproducible and useful. Importantly, Dirac wins there significantly on those tasks because they are mostly refactoring related (which is where approaches like hash-anchoring and AST parsing tend to shine)

[int_19h]

The good thing is that the competition in the field is very cutthroat with so many contenders, so if there are gains to be made they will be made, and then broadly adopted by others.