alt Hacker NewsI have ancedotal examples of claude code choosing a solution to a problem that is ridiculously token inefficient.
One example - was giving several agents different sub problems to solve in a complex ML / forecasting problem. Each agent would write + run + read a jupyter notebook. This worked ok, the notebooks would be verbose but it was fine... until one of them wrote out hundreds of thousands of rows to a cell output, creating a 500MB ipynb file. Claude tried several times to read it and it used my entire context limit.
The solution was to prescribe a better structure of doing the world (via CLI analysis scripts + folders to save research results to). But this required some planning, thought, and design work by me the operator.
When I see people spending $10k a month in tokens, I can only assume they are taking lazy hands off approaches to solving problems with the expensive hammer that is claude code. EX: have claude read all your emails every day... the lazy solution is to simply do that, but a smarter solution is to first filter the email body HTML to remove the noise.
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> have claude read all your emails every day
But that is exactly what it is sold to people to do as a panacea: consume all the data, produce insights.
Nobody is being instructed to be judicious. Everyone is being instructed to use it as much as possible for all problem areas.
> have claude read all your emails every day...
To be fair, I do that. 2-3 times a day, in fact. Not all of my emails (the archive has ballooned to several hundred thousand messages total), but the most recent ones certainly.
My standard prompt is along the lines of "go through the last N days of my emails, identify all threads that I need to know about, action on or follow up with". N is usually a number between 2 and 5. I've specified a standing of set of rules to easily know what is likely a source of noise to aid in skipping the bot spam.
The company is charged API pricing through an enterprise contract, and I remain persistently curious how much I burn. My daily admin-related token expenses appear to fluctuate between $1 and $5. For something that saves me up to 2h of time a day I consider that a rather tolerable deal. (When I dive in to code to do refactors or deep investigations, I can spend as much as $25 a day.)