T | TERSE | ISSUE 001 · MAY 2026 |
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THE TERSE LETTER · 4 MIN READ How I cut my Claude
bill by 73%One config change. Sixty seconds. Most devs are leaving this money on the table. |
Most devs using Claude Code are silently burning 70–90% of their context budget on tokens they've already paid for. Here's the one change that fixes it — and a free tool that shows you exactly when it's working. |
| 01 | What prompt caching actually does |
Claude charges you 10× less for content it's seen before.Your CLAUDE.md, system prompt, and reference files get cached after turn one. Every turn after that bills at 10% of the normal rate for the cached portion. That sounds incremental. It isn't. |
Cost per turn · 10K-token preamble | Without caching | $0.150 / turn |
| With caching | $0.015 / turn |
| → At 2 sessions/day, that's roughly $240/year back. |
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Your cache hit rate is probably under 30%.Claude Code caches automatically — but only when content stays stable. New file reads, inline pastes, and shifting context break the cache before it pays off. The fix: stable content first, volatile content last. |
✗ BUSTS THE CACHE Today's date is… Current task notes CLAUDE.md Reference files |
| ✓ CACHE-SAFE ORDER CLAUDE.md Reference files Project conventions Current task (last) |
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| LIVE | See your savings in real time |
Terse shows what you're saving, every turn. |
Floating optimizer bar — capture, optimize, replace. Always on top. |
Three things to do right now. |
1 | Reorder your CLAUDE.md Move frequently-changing content — dates, session notes, task lists — to the bottom. |
2 | Watch your cache hit rate Terse shows live cache % per turn. Healthy sessions run 60–80%. Under 30% means you're paying full price. |
3 | Check the cost breakdown Terse → Statistics shows your savings in dollars per source — not just token counts. |
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macOS · Free forever tier · 1,500 optimizations/week |
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NEXT WEEK Git diff compression. Claude Code's git diff output routinely hits 30–60K tokens per turn. I'll show the filter that gets it under 5K with zero information loss. |
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Until then — stay terse. — James
Builder of Terse · terseai.org |
