This is more so a “I’m really fucking annoyed by this shit and I’m curious if you are too” thread, with some helpful advice that may improve the experience of many users. Every few weeks or so they will ship an update that inflates session context by 5-10k. These are incremental occurrences with not enough clean up in between and/or not enough tradeoff in order to not bloat every singe users session with shit they are 1. mostly unaware of and 2. don’t need The average user is mostly not aware of these increases and that is unfair to them. Not every user reads the version notes and not every user is tuned into their harness structure & early session context amount. The experienced user is very careful around their early session context amount/post-onboarding context amount. Both of these groups suffer the consequences of poorly engineered updates in the short-term. Both of these groups suffer a compounding consequence over a long period of these updates with, like I said, not enough clean up occurring. It is a lack of consideration and lack of perspective in general of the average & experienced users experiences. In regard to this recent increase of 4.9k tokens, a large % of claude code users, especially terminal users, will not actually use this tool. As said by an instance of claude, here is the most recent increase root cause - “Claude Code v2.1.234 turned on the Artifact tool for your account, and it now loads its full ~4.9k-token definition into every interactive session.” If you want to disable it, set this in your config "“CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ARTIFACT”: “1"” - You will see a reduction of roughly 4.9k tokens per session. If you are new to this kind of thing, you likely want to do a sweep of the harness to find out what you could disable to buy yourself more context. As a reminder, you want to buy as much context space as you can early on in your sessions. If your sessions are overly bloated by things you don’t need, it only serves as clutter. Keep a list of the things you have disabled and you can always double back to re-enable whatever you might need. To the Anthropic employee reading this - you need to hire at least one highly experienced claude code USER (some users have thousands of hours of experience - potentially far more than many anthropic hires) or better yet a group of users to dogfood these kinds of specifics, where to find trade off recommendations, measuring how negative the impact may be vs the usefulness of the specific increaser, testing tradeoffs etc. They can make recommendations and the engineers can factor in their perspective and that could be the extent of their involvement. Come on guys. It’s gettin silly. Reeeeal silly. submitted by /u/Ambitious_Injury_783
Originally posted by u/Ambitious_Injury_783 on r/ClaudeCode