Claude's 1M Context Window Is Live — Here's How to Actually Use It Without Burning Through Your Quota

Anthropic just dropped 1 million token context windows for Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 — generally available, included in Max plans with no extra cost multiplier. This is huge. But if you're not careful, it's also an easy way to blow through your quota in a single afternoon. Here's how I've been approaching large-context sessions without wasting tokens. The Problem Nobody Talks About When you go from 200K to 1M context, the natural instinct is to dump everything in. Your entire codebase. All the docs. Every file that might be relevant. And it works — technically. Claude handles it well. But you're burning 5x the tokens on input for every single response, even when 80% of that context is irrelevant to the current question. I tracked my Claude Code sessions for a month and found something wild: most of my expensive sessions weren't doing complex work. They were doing simple tasks with massively inflated context. 5 Rules I Follow Now 1. Not Every Task Needs the Big Window The 1M window