How to Manage Claude Tokens
✎ Prompt Strategy
Trim your context
History is the silent budget killer
Conversation history is the silent budget killer. Every message you send includes everything said before it. A 20-turn conversation can balloon to 10,000+ tokens before Claude writes a word.
Tactics
- Summarize old turns instead of passing them verbatim
- Start a new conversation when the task changes
- Only include relevant prior context, not the full history
- For one-shot tasks, use a fresh chat every time
operator note
Implement a sliding window — keep the last 3–5 turns verbatim and summarize everything older into a single paragraph.
Changelog · 1
- Initial release — 5 sections, 11 lessons.