[gen220]

It's because by default it'll try to solve most problems agentically / by "thinking", even if your prompt is fairly prescriptive.

I use aider.chat with Claude 3.5 haiku / 3.7 sonnet, cram the context window, and my typical day is under $5.

One thing that can help for lengthy conversations is caching your prompts (which aider supports, but I'm sure Claude Code does, too?)

Obviously, Anthropic has an incentive to get people to use more tokens (i.e. by encouraging you to use tokens on "thinking"). It's one reason to prefer a vendor-neutral solution like aider.