https://naoko.github.io/tags/tokens/Recent content in Tokens on the art of simplicityHugoen-usSun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://naoko.github.io/posts/2026-06-28-cheaper-ai-coding-rtk-codegraph/Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://naoko.github.io/posts/2026-06-28-cheaper-ai-coding-rtk-codegraph/<h1 id="two-ways-to-stop-your-coding-agent-burning-tokens-rtk-and-codegraph">Two Ways to Stop Your Coding Agent Burning Tokens: RTK and CodeGraph</h1> <p>I keep a few Claude Code and Cursor sessions running through the day, and at some point I started actually watching the token counter instead of ignoring it. The thing that struck me wasn&rsquo;t how <em>much</em> it climbed. It was <em>what</em> it climbed on. Most of the budget wasn&rsquo;t going on the model reasoning about my problem. It was going on plumbing: <code>ls</code>, <code>grep</code>, reading the same file three times to rebuild a call path, scrolling a 400-line <code>cargo test</code> dump to find the one assertion that failed.</p>