Token-Optimization

After trimming down to 9 agents and putting CLAUDE.md on a diet, the intervals between Compacting conversation... messages got noticeably longer. Same tasks, but it lasted much longer than before. Felt good. Then I was watching the console after requesting a new feature. Tests ran. 30 cases, all passing. But Claude was mentioning the successful tests again. Something felt subtly off. I asked Claude. “Why are you mentioning tests that already passed?” Claude explained the concept of tools. When Claude executes a terminal command or reads a file, those are all “tool calls.” And every time a tool runs, its entire output stacks into the conversation context. npm test results — 30 lines. Hugo build log — 180 lines. All of it. Tests all passed with nothing to look at, yet it read all 30. For build errors, only the last 5 lines mattered, but it loaded all 180. ...

A friend asked me to build an e-commerce site for cosmetics. I’d been writing nothing but C at work, so this was a chance to try a new stack. Toss Payments for checkout, React for the frontend. “Every next-gen finance project is going React” — that comment stuck with me, and Toss Payments was Node-friendly. The direction came together quickly. Obviously, I’d never used this stack before. I wanted to learn it, but the deadline didn’t allow for “study first, build later.” So I gave vibe coding a shot. ...