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Claude Code token counts questioned after deduplication reveals potential overstatement

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

A user attempting to reproduce a previous claim of 65.5 billion tokens used with Claude Code found a significant discrepancy in token counting. By analyzing a smaller subset of data, they discovered that deduplicating messages by ID resulted in approximately half the token count compared to summing all rows. This suggests that the original claim might have been inflated due to not properly handling duplicate message IDs, with cache reads accounting for a large portion of the token volume. AI

IMPACT Highlights potential issues in token usage reporting for LLMs, impacting cost calculations and performance assessments.

RANK_REASON User analysis of a specific product's usage data questioning previous claims.

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Claude Code token counts questioned after deduplication reveals potential overstatement

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User analysis of a specific product's usage data questioning previous claims.
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. dev.to — LLM tag TIER_1 Dansk(DA) · Michael Lip ·

    A Claude Code log sum doubled after message ID dedupe

    <p>I had a 65.5 billion-token Claude Code claim queued for publication. Then I tried to reproduce it.</p> <p>The old note called its result “30-day,” but its July 18 to August 19 dates cover 33 calendar days. The extractor and daily inclusion list are gone. In the files still on …

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