I think in this case, we probably have different experiences that shape how we see some things differently: I see many (very smart) people doing certain things that are not optimal (eg: copy-paste entire files instead of referencing them or tell claude at every message to "read CLAUDE.md and follow its instructions precisely") which can lead to a lot of token waste. If certain system prompts were tweaked internally or some models now read more files than before, keeping these "inneficient prompts" will make limits exhaust faster. Sub-agents or this new agent teams feature didn't exist until a few months ago: that alone eats A LOT of tokens, not intended for this pre-paid API usage, etc.

The ecosystem is evolving super quickly so, our own experiences and workflows must keep adapting with it to experiment, find limitations and arrive at the "tightest possible scope" that still allows you to get things done, because it is possible.

Another example: pre-paid monthly subscription aggregates usage towards web and Claude Code, for eg. So if you're checking for holiday itineraries over your lunch break, then decide to sit down and ask a team of agents to refactor a giant codebase with hundreds or thousands of files, context will be exhuasted quickly, etc, etc.

I see this "context economy" as a new way of managing your "mental models": every token counts, and every token must bear its weight for the task at hand, otherwise, I'm "wasting budget". I am also still learning how to operate in this new way of doing things, and, while there have been genuine issues with Claude Code, not every single issue that people encounter is an upstream problem.