Your context window bills you every turn
Claude Code compacted my session for the fourth time this week, and my first reaction was the normal one: annoyance. It just erased everything and I have to re-explain half of it.
Then I pointed Claude Code at its own transcript files and did the arithmetic instead of the complaining. The transcripts are just JSONL on disk — every request, every token count, timestamped. Three sessions, 5,288 requests, a few minutes of parsing.
The reframe that came out of it: compaction isn't the tax. It's the tax getting paid off. The tax is every turn before that.
TL;DR
