I Ran the Whole Token-Saving Playbook. The Savings Got Re-Spent.
A tweet with 1.1M views promises to cut your Claude Code token usage by 90%. I ran the whole playbook, then measured the five things actually eating my budget: an SSE chain across 19 files and 8,716 lines, a 13 MB enterprise API spec PDF, 24 knowledge-governance documents, 52 MB of daily business logs, and a 49,480-character CLAUDE.md. The four tools reach two of them. Here is the full measurement: rtk was installed but never once called, the real compression ratio is 32.2% and not 88%, codegraph's stale window is exactly 300 seconds, and 73% of my budget went to a squad of subagents with no model declared. Twenty minutes from now you will be able to open /context and your usage attribution panel and point at where the money actually goes.