Claude

You open Claude, ask a question, and see an answer. That is the entire mental model most people have of a token bill. What is invisible on that same turn is that the session has already loaded a system prompt, whatever memory files apply, the tool definitions, the last few tool results, and — if you asked Claude to read a file — the file too. Add fifty turns and a couple of re-reads to fix a mistake, and the same conversation that felt like ten questions is closer to a hundred pages of input the model is re-processing every time you hit enter. ...

A previous post argued that Dev, QA, and Product read the same requirement differently not because anyone is careless, but because prose leaves three things implicit — the precondition, the action, and the outcome — and that a structured format forces those three things into the open. It also argued that the specific tool doesn’t matter much: Gherkin’s Given/When/Then is one well-known way to get the structure, not the only one, and a team is free to define its own. ...

market-bridge is an MCP server that gives Claude direct access to real-time /ES futures data from the three platforms I trade on. No CSV exports, no context-switching.