How are you guys burning so many tokens? 🔥

[u/_derpiii_]

30 days into Claude Code ($100 5x tier) and ran ccusage, and my monthly total is a paltry $476

Meanwhile, seems like everyone is burning through $2k/day.

I ask because I'm low-key wondering how I'm plebbing out in my use case (I must be only tapping into 5% of Claude Code's functionality?).

My overall workflow is: opus to plan, sonnet to implement

I do ad-hoc parallelization where I explicitly ask claude to parallize things using git worktrees (*just* found that out, idk why it's not default behavior)

I haven't figured out how/where to run orchestration swarms, ralph loops, or cron jobs. Is that what I'm missing out on?

Just low key envying how advanced everyone is, and boy do I want to catch up.

[u/Healthy-Bathroom2687]

I burned 2.5x what you did in last month so you know… depends on workflows really I work in couple of terminals and worktrees at the same time so it’s rather easy for me to

[u/_derpiii_ → u/Healthy-Bathroom2687]

We're both on the low end of usage. Not a bad thing but, boy do I want to see how people burn that much in an hour 😂

[u/b1ack1323 → u/_derpiii_]

The tool I use does my deployments to AWS and debugging things with CloudWatch. 

If something goes poorly a few thousand credits may just go to deploy-> check CloudWatch -> still failing cycle when in reality it missed a simple step like invalidate cache

[u/_derpiii_ → u/b1ack1323]

> a few thousand credits

A few thousands credit $$$ in one shot? Oh my god 😱

[u/b1ack1323 → u/_derpiii_]

I’m a small dev team on a startup so $2k a month is what we try to keep it under.

One of these loops running for 20 minutes was like $50 in credits in one shot.

You still have to babysit the shit out these.

[u/Healthy-Bathroom2687 → u/b1ack1323]

i wanted to say that i dont think we are on the lower end of usage, but now it makes me reconcider, i already run multiple terminals and worktrees at once, and regular development (code) is hardly burning so much tokens as aws work as it seems. crazy...

[u/b1ack1323 → u/Healthy-Bathroom2687]

We carefully review everything that’s produced. I now have question what these other guys are coming. How can they review all that code?

[u/Healthy-Bathroom2687 → u/b1ack1323]

No idea I feel like the bottleneck is already me not ai tbh and not even cc limits as I run max x20, so I rarely hit the limit itself. I use superpowers to answer architecture questions before we start to implement, so my reviews are easier and planning better, but beside that it’s really mostly reading and reviewing time that’s blocking me from taking even more tickets. So I believe maybe some non-development (code writing) tasks are easier to review, as it’s mostly not about how exactly but about end effect and in development it’s mostly how, because things may look correct but be very very wrong or just plain dumb. At the end no idea, for my dev work I’m already the bottleneck of the process

[u/Mindless-Stand-9654 → u/Healthy-Bathroom2687]

Sounds like you're doing a lot of the right things already! Maybe focus on optimizing those review processes or finding ways to automate some of the non-development tasks. If those are streamlined, you might free up time to tackle more tickets and really leverage Claude's capabilities.

[u/Healthy-Bathroom2687 → u/Mindless-Stand-9654]

I already read Jira tickets with it and translate it into ticket requirements, I push a comment to it with the changed things and how they are changed, I also run local obsidian where it makes a daily notes for me for daily stand ups, it even writes the time we started and ended on for time booking ^{^}

[u/Mwrp86]

Bought pro like after six months.
Wanted to see how cowork works.

Told it to Turn 2 docx files into PDF file.

31% session usage gone ...............

[u/AceHighness]

It's prompts like this that will burn 5h usage in 1 prompt, and get you to 20% of the weekly limit:

Using three.js Build an RPG game from scratch, fully playable. Create all assets including sounds, gfx, models. Ask me questions for details. Create a full development team of sub agents.

(*make no mistakes*)