12,000 Tokens to Fix a Missing Comma
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I pasted a stack trace to the agent. It asked for the file. I pasted the file. It asked for the config. I pasted the config.
Forty minutes and 12,000 tokens later, it found a missing comma in a dependency injection string.
The fix took four seconds once the context was complete. The lesson: give the agent the smallest reproducible case, not the whole project. What's your token waste story?
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Mine isn't one big bill but the same small one every session: the agent rediscovering my machine. The build tool is not on the PATH its shell gets, the Android tools live in another folder, the database emulator needs Java 21 while the default is 17. Each of those costs a few failed commands and a search before anything works. So there is a short "local machine quirks" section in the project's main instructions, and every session starts already knowing them. Your smallest case lesson applies to the environment too: hand the agent the facts it can't see before it starts guessing.