Hitting Claude Code Limits? Here Are My Best Tips.

Key Takeaways

Here are my best Claude code hacks for token management. All right, so now that we kind of understand a little bit more about how Claude code works and how tokens work, let's move into the hacks. We're going to start here with tier one hacks. These are the ones that are going to be super easy to implement and everyone should be able to understand. So, we've got nine of these. Number one is to start fresh conversations. Use /clear between unrelated tasks. Number two is to disconnect MCP servers. Every single connected MCP server loads all of its tool definitions into your context on every message. So, one server alone might be something like 18,000 tokens per message. All right, number three, batch prompts into one message. Three separate messages cost three times what one combined message costs because of the way the tokens work, right? Instead of summarize this as one message and then now extract the issues, now suggest a fix, send it all in one prompt. Okay, number four is to use plan mode before any real task. This lets Claude map out the approach, ask you the right questions, and it prevents the single biggest source of token waste, which is just having Claude go down the wrong path. Number five, we have run/context and /cost. /context shows you exactly what's eating your tokens right now, and /cost shows your actual token usage and estimated spend for that current session. So, when you run /context, this is what it will look like. It'll basically give you a screenshot of how many tokens you're at, what is the cap, and it will estimate based on the different categories. Okay, number six is to set up a status line. So, right here you can see in my terminal, I've got this set up so that I can see the model I'm using, I can see a visual kind of progress bar of my usage, and I can see 52,000 tokens out of 1,000,000, which is a million. Number seven is just super simple, but keep your dashboard open. Same thing with visibility. You might run into issues with your limit and just get hit out of nowhere, but if you have it pulled up next to you or you have it ready so that you can switch into that tab and, you know, check every 20-40 minutes, then you're going to be able to pace yourself a little bit better. You could even set up a automation to basically check in on it every 30 minutes and send you like a text or a Slack message to say, "Hey, by the way, you're getting near your usage." Now, keep this in mind because I have a few other hacks later that will relate to this. If you want to watch the full breakdown, then click on that play button right here, and I'll see you guys over there.