Where Do Your Claude Code Tokens Actually Go? We Traced Every Single One

You're paying for 200,000 tokens of context. But how many of those tokens are actually doing useful work? We built ClaudeTUI — a set of monitoring tools for Claude Code — and dug into the raw JSONL transcript data to trace every token. What we found surprised us: there are four distinct categories of token usage, and only one of them is your actual work. What Happens When You Press Enter Here's something most Claude Code users don't realize: every time you press Enter, the entire conversation is sent from scratch. The Claude API is stateless. It doesn't remember your previous messages. So every single keystroke triggers an API call that includes: System prompt (~14k tokens) — Claude Code's instructions, tool definitions, your CLAUDE.md Full conversation history — every message, every tool call, every tool result since the last compaction Your new message On turn 1, that's maybe 15k tokens. By turn 15, it's 100k. By turn 30, it's 167k — and then compaction fires. This is why Claude gets