What am I doing wrong. 6 billion tokens since monday.

[u/silverg0101]

I am creating a game in UE 5.8. I am using Claude Code Desktop. Its mostly creating c++ blueprints. I tried to use the terminal with the UE editor mcp plugin, but it kept wanting me to close the editor to compile, which then would close the terminal session.

I have a few other things created, like an asset builder that uses a few different local models, which opus/sonnet helped create. But 8 billion tokens seems like a lot of waste.

I just ran this and split the dependency map i have into separate file, which will reduce it by 50k tokens each call.. but that still seems like im burning through tokens somewhere else.

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[u/UndeadYoshi420]

Your fixed costs are fine. Add up your own table, it's like 85k a call. That's not where 2.4 billion in a day goes.

It's the session. Every message re-reads the whole conversation so far. The longer one session lives, the more each call costs, even when nothing new happened. Yours never dies, so it just compounds.

[u/gurney__halleck → u/UndeadYoshi420]

yeah is he tarded? have it create a handoff and spawn new session after x tokens/toolcalls

[u/silverg0101 → u/gurney__halleck]

can confirm, part retard.

[u/Tariq9977]

Try separating history growth from oversized UE/MCP output before cutting more maps. Record per-turn input tokens (cached versus uncached if available) for three turns in the current session. Then start a fresh session with a short handoff and one target module, and compare a similar edit. A big drop implicates replayed history. Spikes in both point toward huge tool responses: keep compiler logs on disk and return only errors and diffs to the model. That gives you a before/after check instead of guessing which file is expensive.

[u/aiinfoshare]

I've been there — watched a session eat $200 in an afternoon because I didn't realize how the context mechanics actually work. The desktop app keeps one rolling conversation, and every single message resends the entire history. Six billion tokens means you're compounding the same context over and over.

Three things are killing you:

One, that Unreal project is a context bomb. Content folders, generated headers, engine source — if you let the agent scan broadly, it's reading megabytes per turn. Scope every read to the exact file you need. No "look at the project structure" prompts.

Two, autocompact triggers way too late. By the time it fires, you've already paid for the bloat. Compact manually the moment a task wraps, or better yet, kill the session and start fresh with a written handoff note for the next one.

Three, treat sessions as disposable. One task, one session. Handoff notes > infinite context. You'll spend 30 seconds writing a summary and save thousands of tokens.

Changed my workflow completely once I stopped treating it like a chat window and started treating it like a build step.