Not sure how you use CC, but the last 6 months has felt like significant optimization efforts to me. Last year Claude would just read and edit files, now it's all kinds of basic tool gymnastics with grep/awk/sed/etc to narrowly slice and avoid token-heavy reads. Resuming sessions that aren't even that large get a scary prompt about using a significant portion of your token budget if you continue without compacting.

To me it feels like a worse experience, and they probably feel it too, but it makes sense from an optimization perspective. I've probably learned some shell tricks, but also going blind from watching Claude try dozens of variations of some multi-line chained and piped wall of bash nightmare, instead of just reading a few files.