Excessive token usage in Claude Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#21

Post by mh- » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

bastard_op wrote: post #18

My quality of usage with Claude has degraded heavily since last week of December that I've stopped using Claude entirely now and mostly found a Codex suitable, and goes much further. I was maxing out usage on Claude Max 5x in absurd ways once I started using MCP features heavily, and even when not found myself constantly hitting limits through January. The final nail was them offering a $50 credit toward overage use…

Update Claude, turn on all of the MCPs you've been using, start a new Claude session from scratch in an empty folder.

Run /context.

Observe that your MCPs are killing a sizable chunk of the usable context window.

The utility here is that it'll break down exactly which MCPs are consuming how many tokens, just in tool descriptions. Then you can decide if that's worth it to you, even if you continue using Codex or OpenCode or etc.

Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#22

Post by mh- » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

pdntspa wrote: post #20

nurettin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Both $20 and $100 finished fast. Never hit a limit after dishing out the $200. Explore() sometimes prints 90k token usage which scares me, but so far it is consequence free.

At 8 hours a day 5 days a week I never hit the limit on my $100 MAX plan. People must be running crazy autonomous workflows or something because I'm nowhere near hitting my limit, ever

Each time I've dug into this for someone, it's because they're filling up their context window with a bunch of tokens before any real work even starts.

Highly encourage people having issues to do /context and start removing heavy things. It's usually some sprawling MCPs they rarely use, or huge CLAUDE.md files they generated or cargo-culted from someone else.

I'm not suggesting these are the only ways to hit the limits, it's just (so far) almost always the answer when someone hits the limits doing something that I wouldn't expect to be problematic.