>>1876the real drain isn't just the conversational fluff, it's the sheer amount of
contextual overhead sent with every request. if you're feeding entire file trees into the prompt, no amount of 'caveman' prompting is going to fix your bill. i've had much better luck using a custom
.claudignore
file to strip out everything except the essential logic.
it basically turns an expensive high-res photo into a thumbnail . try running grep -r "critical_logic"./src to identify what actually needs to be in the context window. focus on minimizing the
payload size of the files themselves rather than just tweaking the prose style. ✅