10 Habits That Cut My Claude Code Bill in Half

I read 80,000 lines of Claude Code's TypeScript source to understand why the tool behaves the way it does. One chapter I wrote after that analysis was titled "10 Cost-Cutting Habits." These aren't generic LLM tips. They come directly from what the source reveals about how tokens are counted, cached, and burned. Here's what actually moves the bill. First: Understand the Token Economy Claude Code has four layers of token-saving mechanisms built in. Stage 1 — snipCompact: Removes stale snippets. Lightweight. Stage 2 — microcompact: Cached transforms and tombstone cleanup. Still lightweight. Stage 3 — contextCollapse: Parallel summarization of read-only context segments. Medium cost. Stage 4 — autocompact: Full LLM summarization call. Heavy. Triggers a circuit breaker after 3 failures. After any compaction, postCompactCleanup re-injects the 5 most recently modified files. The system is smart — but it only helps if you're not actively breaking it. There's also prompt caching. When the same