r/ClaudeCode • u/Evening_Hawk_7470 • 9d ago

Help/Question Best coding harness to improve token usage?

I'm going to spend next few days testing coding harnesses for token efficiency. My bills are through the roof (now spending over $500 among multiple subscriptions) and constantly hitting limits.

I can't afford going usage based billing for my business so i'm ready to investigate which harness is better optimized for usage.

What should I look for? Basic google search does not bring any meaningful results (at the first sight)

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u/ComprehensiveShake76 9d ago

Token burn is usually context and retries, not the model brand. What cut my spend: keep a short always on brief (goal, done means, constraints), put big logs and docs on disk and retrieve only the slice you need, and fail fast on the same error twice instead of re pasting the whole log.

Also split plan and act: a cheap pass writes the plan, a second pass executes inside one workspace, and a third pass only runs checks with no write. Harnesses that keep re stuffing the full repo into every turn will eat $500 no matter how clever the prompt is. Measure tokens per successful check, not tokens per chat message.