Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

I'm finding that unexpected cache rewrites cost me huge.

I have 1h cache TTL set, and do nothing to cause rewrite (response in time, no model/effort/tool changes).

At 400K tokens in, I'll write a message, and /usage shows only a small increase in cache write. On the next message, cache writes shows 800K, and by the end, I often hit 2M cache writes with no explanation.

This seems to happen when: using /btw, asking it to review code, other random times. Anyone know what's going on?

After having used Codex for a promotional month, and now using Claude, Claude is not as efficient with finding relevant information. I can give it the one file it should be using and then it goes off and greps parent directories for more context. It’s also incredibly slow at producing results because of this side work. In this article, it seems like they are catching up to what GitHub copilot users had already been doing since the cost restructuring in June.