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Comment by Esophagus4 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have good tips or resources on token management best practices? Because I’ve hit the limiter with one single prompt now on Opus 4.7.

What I’m reading so far seems to be:

-selective use of models based on task complexity

-encoding large repos into more digestible and relevant data structures to reduce constant reingesting

-ask Claude to limit output to X tokens (as output tokens are more expensive)

-reduce flailing by giving plenty of input context

-use Headroom and RTK

-disable unused MCP, move stuff from CLAUDE.md to skills

But I’d love to learn if anyone has any good tips, links, or tools as I’m getting rate limited twice a day now.

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Thank you for sharing these tips! Just checked RTK and Headroom out and looks like Headroom actually uses RTK under the hood for CLI output compression: https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom#compared-to

Didn’t realize that, thank you!

I’m working on a tool that is a more token-efficient code search than grep. I don’t have hard numbers yet, but it’s been working for me to get longer sessions. https://github.com/ebcode/SourceMinder

Oh nice! Thank you, I will definitely give this a shot.

I was looking at tree-sitter myself for this task.

It's still in beta, and I'm hoping to get more feedback, so feel free to post in the issues or reach out directly if you run into any problems.

What was your single prompt? That seems highly unlikely.

“Ok Claude, I bet you can’t hit the usage limit in one shot… let’s see what you got you little token gremlin”

;)

I just asked it to do a security analysis in a subagent of an unmaintained browser extension and then go fix vulnerabilities it found so I can use it without worrying.

So it sounds like you were using it on auto mode then if it went ahead and fixed the vulnerabilities without additional turns? If so, that isn't really a single prompt.

It got limited while it was reading the repo before starting to fix, but yes you’re right. I think I was in auto mode or at least approving all the exploration.

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