Part 7 (finale) of Claude Code, Beyond the Prompt — patterns from running a live automated trading system on Claude Code. Part 6: GitHub as Claude's task queue.
Every token Claude reads costs you twice: once in money, once in time. A bloated context isn't just a bigger bill — it's a slower response, every single turn.
When people want to fix this, they reach for the wrong lever: switch to a cheaper model. But the model isn't where the waste is. The waste is in making Claude read things it doesn't need to and redo things it shouldn't have to. And it turns out the six pieces from this series — built for other reasons — are, almost by accident, a token-reduction system.
Here's how the savings actually work, and how to measure your own. This is the payoff article, so it's concrete.
The core insight: tokens are the currency of both cost and speed
