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Excessive token consumption after recent updates (Max plan) #41617

@tjazevedo

Description

@tjazevedo

Bug Description

After recent Claude Code updates, token consumption has become disproportionately high. Tasks that previously consumed a reasonable amount of tokens are now using significantly more, making the tool impractical even on the Max plan.

Environment

  • Plan: Claude Max (5x usage)
  • Platform: Linux (WSL2)
  • Claude Code version: Latest
  • Model: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context)

Expected Behavior

Token consumption should be proportional to the complexity of the task being performed. Previous versions maintained reasonable consumption levels.

Actual Behavior

Token usage has increased dramatically after recent updates. The consumption is disproportionate to the work being done, causing rapid exhaustion of the daily token budget even on the Max plan.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Use Claude Code normally for development tasks
  2. Observe token consumption in the usage dashboard
  3. Compare with consumption levels from ~2-3 weeks ago for similar tasks

Additional Context

This appears to have started with recent Claude Code updates. The issue seems systemic rather than task-specific — all interactions consume more tokens than before, suggesting a platform-level change in how tokens are being counted or consumed.

Would appreciate investigation into whether there have been changes to token accounting, context management, or prompt overhead that could explain this increase.

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    area:costbugSomething isn't workingduplicateThis issue or pull request already existsplatform:linuxIssue specifically occurs on Linuxplatform:wslIssue specifically occurs on WSL

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