This one’s on me. With the older Claude models I had all kinds of habits to keep sessions short: new chat per task, notes in a file, that sort of thing. As the models got smarter and did more on their own, I got lazy. Some days I stayed in the same session from morning until evening, just because it kept working fine. Then I checked my usage and I was at 90% of my weekly limit with 3 days still to go. That was a wake-up call. Every message re-reads the entire context, so a session that’s been running all day pays for the same history over and over. I read through this sub to see how other people dealt with it, picked up a bunch of tips, and ended up building my own setup out of them. It installs globally in ~/.claude , so it works in every project, old and new, without me doing anything per project. What’s in it: A hook that checks context size on every prompt and warns me (and Claude) at 120k, 180k and 250k tokens. It also warns when I’ve been idle long enough that the cache is probably cold, because then the next prompt re-reads everything at full price. A hook that cuts test/build/lint output down to the failures and the summary, so huge logs don’t end up in context. On Windows it also blocks heredoc file writes, which caused a lot of broken commands for me. A status line with model, context size and cache warm/cold, so I actually see what’s going on. A /handoff skill: runs tests, commits, writes a short HANDOFF.md. Then I /clear and say “continue per HANDOFF.md” in a fresh session. Saying “I’m done for today” triggers it too. A /project-status skill for a quick status without Claude going off and starting new work. A block in my global CLAUDE.md: grep before reading whole files, keep command output short, Haiku for searching, Sonnet for normal subagent work, kill dev servers when done. Auto-compact at 200k instead of near 1M. Honestly the habit change matters more than the tooling: one task per session, handoff, clear, continue. So far I’m getting the same kind of work done at a much lower burn rate. I haven’t measured it properly, that’s just what I see in my usage since I switched. The hooks are tested on fake transcripts, not much in real use yet, so expect some rough edges. The 55 minute cold-cache threshold is also a guess on my part. If you also tend to live in one session all day, this might save you from a rough week. Happy to share the files if anyone wants them. submitted by /u/IronbornV
Originally posted by u/IronbornV on r/ClaudeCode