Claude's 'Hello' Message Reportedly Consumes 2% of Available Tokens

A viral observation about Claude's token overhead on simple interactions highlights the hidden costs of conversational AI scaffolding.

A post from @RoundtableSpace noting that Claude's response to a simple "hello" consumes approximately 2% of available context tokens went viral on Tuesday. While partly a meme, the observation touches on a real concern for developers working with context-limited models: system prompts, safety preambles, and conversational scaffolding consume meaningful token budget before a user's actual task begins.

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