Venting out on reddit is fine but if you want to do something about the underlying issue then below are a few things you can do for yourself. Understand how, exactly, tokens are consumed by the model and what it costs you. Input tokens vs output tokens costs (output tokens are much more expensive). Cached vs non-cached tokens cost (non-cached much more expensive). Cache TTL (normally only 5 minutes). And more. Structure your work following that understanding. This requires a few hours or days of your time but it’s massively worth it in terms of cost and result quality, for long-term projects. When a particular session consumes a lot of tokens, use Opus to analyze its transcript and identify how the tokens are consumed. When the analysis is done, ask it to make a plan for reducing token consumption in future similar sessions. Don’t trust that plan - ask it to spawn an advisor Opus subagent which should critically review the plan and suggest improvements. Opus is pretty good in analysis but when coming up with a plan for a complex task it may build the plan based on false premises or make judgement mistakes or miss something important. The advisor subagent should be resumable because you may want the first agent to negotiate details with the advisor. Use your own brain: understand what the plan actually does (or ask for clarifications). Likely you will think of an improvement that the models didn’t consider. If using subagents, check how much the subagent sessions cost you in terms of tokens and do the same analysis as described in (3) for a subagent session which costed you more than expected. (3) and (4) will likely give you information you can use to make custom briefs for subagents or build custom tools to reduce the amount of work your agents are doing, or improve the documentation structure so agents get the information they need (rather than re-deriving it on every session), and only the information they need (rather than loading useless bloat into their context). Hope this helps. submitted by /u/anton-k_
Originally posted by u/anton-k_ on r/ClaudeCode