I was burning through AI tokens without realizing it. Here's how I fixed it.

I've been using Claude Code and Codex daily for months. They're some of the best programming tools I've tried. But there's something nobody tells you when you start: context runs out fast, and the cost grows exponentially. The real problem isn't the message you're sending When you're 50 messages into a session and you send message 51, your CLI doesn't just send that message. It sends all 51. The entire conversation, from the beginning, with every single request. On top of that, Claude Code's system prompt is 13,000 characters — also sent with every message. Every command result the AI has run, every file it read, every search it performed — all of it is in the history, resent again and again. In a real session, message 51 can end up sending 85,000 characters to the API. For a single message. Why existing tools don't fix this There's a very popular tool for this problem: RTK (Rust Token Killer), with over 16,000 GitHub stars. It does exactly what it promises: it works as a shell wrapper