I burned through $50 credits in a sitting the first time I used Claude Code to see what I could vibe-code from scratch. You're pushing whole files of tokens through it every time you interact with it.
Huh, maybe the reason it doesn't use this much for me is because my work has mostly source files that are far too large for Claude Code to read. It always has to ask for permission to use grep because it can't figure out how to use the read tool properly. I've done entire new features on probably around $15 of credit max.