Reducing your Claude token bill without giving up capability
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. ...