Besides some of the obvious hacks to reduce token usage, properly indexed code bases (think IntelliJ) reduce token usage significantly (30%-50%, while keeping or exceeding result quality compared with baseline) as shown with https://github.com/ory/lumen

Anthropic is not incentivized to reduce token use, only to increase it, which is what we are seeing with Opus 4.6 and now they are putting the screws on