Over-editing is a token tax: GPT-5.4 ships 6.5x more diff per fix than Claude Opus 4.6, and your bill notices

A model is over-editing if its output is functionally correct but structurally diverges from the original code more than the minimal fix requires. Left unconstrained, the extended reasoning gives models more room to 'improve' code that doesn't need improving. GPT-5.4 averages 0.395 normalized Levenshtein distance per edit. Claude Opus 4.6 averages 0.060. That is 6.5x more output tokens for the same class of fix, averaged across the benchmark. Pass@1 correctness is similar (0.723–0.912 across mo...