i was burning a ton of tokens on silly stuff

has anyone else noticed they're chewing through claude tokens way faster than they should be? anthropic just announced they're tightening the 5-hour session limits during peak hours and it made me actually look at where my tokens were going. turns out most of it was waste. claude was reading files it had no reason to read like lock files, build artifacts, node_modules, coverage reports, media files. every time it explored the codebase it was burning tokens on stuff that would never help it write better code. i added a .claudeignore file: # Dependencies node_modules/ .pnp.* # Build artifacts .next/ out/ build/ dist/ # Lock files (huge, no value to read) package-lock.json pnpm-lock.yaml yarn.lock # Minified bundles *.min.js *.min.css # Generated code next-env.d.ts *.tsbuildinfo # Caches .cache/ __pycache__/ coverage/ # Environment / secrets .env* .vercel/ # Large non-code files *.gif *.mov *.mp4 *.png *.jpg it works like .gitignore but for claude's file exploration. claude won't read or