If you'd told me a year ago that good manners were costing me money, I'd have laughed.

I'm a developer. I use Claude Code every day — debugging, refactoring, shipping features. I trusted it. I was also paying $180 a month for it, a number I'd rationalized as the cost of being a serious AI power user.

Then I pulled three months of session logs and started counting.

The 35% Problem

Roughly a third of my input tokens were going to content that provided zero signal to the model.

Phrases like:

"Could you please help me with…"

"If it's not too much trouble…"

"I was wondering if you might be able to…"

"What I'd like you to do here is just…"

I was talking to Claude like a nervous intern I didn't want to offend. Claude doesn't have feelings. It doesn't work harder because you said "please." The politeness tax is 100% yours, billed at the same rate as your actual instructions.

The math is real. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is priced at $3 per million input tokens. But that's not the number that matters.…