Conversational Development With Claude Code — Part 15: Cost Control and Model Strategy in Claude Code

Conversational Development With Claude Code — Part 15: Cost Control and Model Strategy in Claude Code TL;DR Controlling cost in Claude Code is not about fear — it is about awareness. In this chapter, we explore how to read real-time token usage in the CLI, analyze historical consumption with ccusage , strategically select models (Sonnet 4.5, Opus, Haiku), leverage caching to reduce costs dramatically, and understand how authentication method (subscription vs Anthropic Console) changes your pricing strategy. This is where engineering meets economics. The hidden dimension of AI-assisted engineering When you write code, you think about: Architecture Performance Readability Scalability But when you work with large language models, there is a new axis: Token economics. Claude Code makes cost visible. And visibility changes behavior. Professional engineers do not optimize blindly — they measure first. Real-time session cost inside the CLI Claude Code exposes session metrics directly in the t