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Comment by mdrachuk | Hacker News Reader

> You can see this in practice when you use Claude Code, which is pay-per-token. Our heaviest users are using $50/month of tokens. That’s a lot of tokens.

How is your usage so low! Every time i do anything with claude code i spend couple of bucks, for a day of coding it's about $20. Is there a way to save on tokens on a mid-sized Python project or people are just using it less?

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It's because by default it'll try to solve most problems agentically / by "thinking", even if your prompt is fairly prescriptive.

I use aider.chat with Claude 3.5 haiku / 3.7 sonnet, cram the context window, and my typical day is under $5.

One thing that can help for lengthy conversations is caching your prompts (which aider supports, but I'm sure Claude Code does, too?)

Obviously, Anthropic has an incentive to get people to use more tokens (i.e. by encouraging you to use tokens on "thinking"). It's one reason to prefer a vendor-neutral solution like aider.

This is my experience too, I can burn $20 on a big refactoring in a few hours no problem

A lot of the time (when it works) I think its easily worth the money, but I would quickly break their $100 a month budget

How though? Are you putting a massive code base into context each time?

Yeah, I think you need to do task in more discrete chunks, so you aren't' sending so many tokens each request by the end.

With Aider, you typically select only that part of the codebase that you want to work on. You can do this manually, or let the agent find files itself. It tends to break down if you need more than 20 files or so in the context.

That seems really high to me. Maybe you write a lot more code than anyone else around. How big is the codebase? I have a feeling that (+ the stack) has a big impact.

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