Claude Code Was Burning Tokens Until I Put a Gate in Front of It
I love using Claude Code. The promise is undeniable: rapid refactoring, lightning-fast debugging, and a highly capable AI agent operating right in the terminal.
But a few sessions in, I hit a massive roadblock. My token usage was skyrocketing, the agent was slowing down, and I was burning through usage limits at a frustrating pace.
When I dug into the logs to see where my context was going, the culprit wasn't complex coding problems. It was pure context bloat. The agent was acting like a data hoarder. It would run an unbounded grep across the repository, dumping thousands of lines of terminal output into the chat. Or worse, it would use the Read tool to slurp a massive 2,000-line file just to modify a single, isolated function.
Because LLMs resend the entire conversation history on every single turn, a sloppy full-file read on turn three isn't a one-time fee....
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