I was burning through AI tokens without realizing it. Here's how I fixed it.

I've been using Claude Code and Codex daily for months. They're some of the best programming tools I've tried. But there's something nobody tells you when you start: context runs out fast, and the cost grows exponentially . The real problem isn't the message you're sending When you're 50 messages into a session and you send message 51, your CLI doesn't just send that message. It sends all 51 . The entire conversation, from the beginning, with every single request. On top of that, Claude Code's system prompt is 13,000 characters — also sent with every message. Every command result the AI has run, every file it read, every search it performed — all of it is in the history, resent again and again. In a real session, message 51 can end up sending 85,000 characters to the API. For a single message. Why existing tools don't fix this There's a very popular tool for this problem: RTK (Rust Token Killer) , with over 16,000 GitHub stars. It does exactly what it promises: it works as a shell wrap