Caught myself firing off a prompt full of typos today (“habndle”, “currwntly”) and Claude cli continued merrily away — then remembered why (with a claude nudge and re-explanation). It doesn’t read your letters, it reads tokens, about 3 characters. Words become fragments (“habndle” → hab+nd+le). Words with typos are also fragments. Reads fine anyway, because the surrounding tokens/words carry the meaning — and it was trained on the internet, which can’t spell either. So token cost is basically nothing: a typo turns one token into maybe three, so a handful of extra tokens across a whole message. Rounding error. Where it actually bites is the exact stuff — variable names, file paths, API names (and def do not share a key in your chat!), search terms. No context to rescue a typo there. Plus the sneaky one: “form” vs “from”, “their” vs “there”. Both real words, so the model gets zero signal anything’s wrong and just takes you literally. Quick conclusion is don’t bother putting effort into fixing typos for the AI’s sake. Do fix them in code and names (or at least make a decent effort). At the same time, has anyone actually had a typo change the answer they got? Curious where the line really is. submitted by /u/marksterberlin
Originally posted by u/marksterberlin on r/ClaudeCode