Token Waste in Claude Code: A User's Self-Audit Shows Behavioral Fixes Beat Model Switching

A Reddit user spent a week measuring where their Claude Code tokens actually went, rather than just complaining about the May price changes. Their conclusion: most burn was self-inflicted, and behavioral changes bought back more headroom than switching models would have.

Biggest Wins

• /clear between unrelated tasks — a stale 200k-token context riding along for a one-line fix was the single most expensive habit.
• Make it plan before it touches files. One planning pass, then execute — cheaper and better than explore-edit-explore in a loop.
• Stop letting it re-read files it just touched. If it just edited a file, it does not need to reopen it to "verify." Say so once in your rules.
• Search with a subagent, not the main thread. Grep-and-read across a repo dumps the whole haystack into your main context permanently. A subagent returns just the answer.
• Kill always-on and -p loops you are not watching. Background agents burning tokens while you sleep are most of the horror-story bills.

None of these fixes required a new subscription, a wrapper, or an MCP server. It was discipline the user admits being too lazy to apply while limits felt infinite.

The post acknowledges that none of this fixes the actual price hikes — it just stops you burning extra on top of them.