Published Oct 25, 2026, 4:30 PM EDT

Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek with over a decade of experience using and writing about open-source software, Linux, Android, AI, and personal productivity. He writes about software, operating systems, and tools that help people get more from the technology they already use.

Do you, like me, obsess over your Claude sessions, trying to optimize everything down to a single token? If so, you’re in good company — I’ve been trying everything to stretch my $20 Claude Pro subscription as far as I can. However, all your tweaks and adjustments only work if you’re building them on a solid foundation. As it turns out, the way I was using Claude was actually working against me and inflating my token usage from the very first message.

I sent “Hi,” and the token usage was already at 85K

Claude’s handling a lot of context under the hood

Claude Cowork used to have a /context command that showed how many tokens a chat had consumed up to that point.…