Developer tools
Every message you send to a coding agent carries the whole conversation with it. This film follows one session from the first message, then looks at antiburn, an open-source tool that checks every session for the common causes of token burn.
The cost is not the message you type. It is everything sent with it.
Every claim the film makes, where it comes from, and how far the source lets it go.
| Claim in the film | Source | How far it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Reusing a cached prefix costs less than sending and writing it again | Anthropic prompt caching docs | API pricing, not a subscription-quota formula |
| /compact summarises the conversation and the summary replaces it | Claude Code docs | Compaction frees context; it does not refill quota |
| Estimated API cost and provider-reported plan usage are separate measures | antiburn docs: tokens, cost and quota | No plan percentage is invented from token traffic |
| Repeated cache rebuilding is a cause of burn that antiburn checks for | antiburn docs: excess cache rehydration | Not every cache write is a rebuild or avoidable |
| antiburn is free, open source and analyses sessions locally | antiburn FAQ and README | Privacy is quoted from the README as of 14 Oct 2026; zero network activity is not claimed |
| The first request is 7 tokens | OpenAI o200k tokenizer | Claude's own count may be 8 to 10 |
Cache lifetimes differ by provider, so any single figure would be wrong for most viewers.
The film shows what to inspect before paying for more usage. It does not promise savings, more quota or automatic optimisation.
A screenshot is not an invoice, and that session never hit its limit.
Cut to keep one story: one session, its context and its checks.
Independent explainer. Not affiliated with antiburn or its makers, and not paid or asked to make it.
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