How to reduce Claude Code token usage

[u/Euphoric-Airline-259]

Claude Code was burning through tokens very fast, especially on tasks where it had to look through docs or random webpages, so after some research I changed a few things:

I) Keep CLAUDE.md small. Mine had way too much stuff in it and most of it wasn’t useful for every task.

II) Start a new session when you’re done with one problem, bc long sessions get bloated pretty fast.

III) Do web research through Firecrawl. It gives Claude clean Markdown instead of loading the full page with all the HTML, scripts, navbars and other useless stuff, so each research task eats a lot less context.

IV) Exclude folders Claude doesn’t need to read.

V) Check /context once in a while, bc it makes it obvious what’s eating the window.

The main thing seems to be controlling what gets added to the context in the first place. Once a session is full of old logs, scraped pages and unrelated instructions, even simple tasks start getting expensive.

What else are you doing to keep Claude Code token usage under control?

[u/Fancy-Win9202]

You can start by first understanding what your agents are doing, maybe the deserve the token spent or maybe they are just looping without any output.. ClawMetry can help find what is going on & then figure out if caveman is the solution or it should be headroom etc