[r/LocalLLaMA] Claude Code sends 62,600 characters of tool definitions per turn. I ran the same model through five CLIs and traced every API call.

Summary

A user on r/LocalLLaMA discovered that Anthropic's Claude model, when used with code, transmits an exceptionally large amount—62,600 characters—of tool definitions with each turn. This observation was confirmed by tracing API calls across five different command-line interfaces. This finding highlights a potential inefficiency or design choice in Claude's API usage for tool-augmented tasks, which could impact performance or cost for developers.

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