OK, for context, I have Claude Code desktop app driving the CLI and orchestrating the code and verification tasks to try to save tokens. So Claude runs things, a Deepseek 4.1 Flash (cloud) session does the planning, Qwen 3.8 27b Q8 does the boiler plate coding and Muse Glimmer sanity checks the code and pushes any issues back to Qwen. If there are issues Qwen and Glimmer can't agree on, Deepseek validates. If Deepseek can't sort it out, it goes back to Claude.
This had been working fine, but then in the last few days token use spiked, tasks that used to take 10 minutes were taking an hour or more and Qwen started going into more and more reasoning loops.
It seems that since I last checked (on 12th September) the CLI changed. I used to strip unnecessary tool calls from the prompt using --disallowedTools and enabledPlugins: false.
It would seem that these no longer work.
In the end I got Claude to build a request-dumping diagnostic server, that actually measured the payload bytes, and confirmed --tools (an allowlist) is the flag that works now: 55→7 tools, 161KB→24KB, byte-verified. It also caught something specific to my workflow running the wrapper from inside an already-active