Claude Code Is Burning Your Tokens — And That's a Symptom, Not the Problem

There's a pattern emerging across Reddit, Hacker News, and dev blogs: "Why is Claude suddenly eating all my tokens?" At first it sounds like a pricing issue. Read enough complaints, and a deeper story appears — one about how we're using AI to code, not just how much it costs. The Complaints Are Consistent (and Legit) "My tokens are disappearing and I don't know why." Sub-agents run loops. Tools get invoked repeatedly. Context expands silently. You think you're making one request — the system might be doing 20. "Simple tasks suddenly cost way more." Behind every request: full conversation history, system prompts, tool definitions, intermediate reasoning. Thousands of tokens consumed before the model even starts answering. "I gave it a task… and it just kept going." Claude Code isn't a chatbot — it's an agent. It plans, executes, retries, and explores. Sometimes too much. Every extra step burns more tokens. The "Vibe Coding" Trap The idea is seductive: write a PRD, hand it to Claude, let