What I Learned Cutting Claude Code's Token Bill by 77%

What building a profiler for AI coding agents taught me about the hidden river of data flowing to Claude on every turn, and how to cut most of it without changing a single result.

Dashboard live demo · Source

(The live dashboard profiles a real DeepSeek session — the plumbing is identical for Claude Code.)

You can't fix what you can't see

An AI coding agent feels like magic: ask it to fix a bug, it reads files, writes code, runs tests, reports back. Underneath, it's just making HTTP requests to a model, over and over — traffic you never see. I built the AI Agent Profiler (aap): a transparent proxy that records every request byte-for-byte and passes it through untouched. The first thing that jumps out is the volume.