T | TERSE | ISSUE 002 · JUNE 2026 |
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THE TERSE LETTER · 4 MIN READ Your git diff is
costing you 30K tokensEvery turn. And most of it is noise you will never read. |
When Claude Code runs git diff, it dumps the entire output into your context — routinely 30,000 to 60,000 tokens on a busy branch. You pay for every one of them, every turn they stay in context. Here's how to cut that by 90% without losing a thing Claude needs. |
A 200-line change can weigh 40,000 tokens.Most of that isn't your change. It's unchanged context lines, whitespace, vendored code, and — the silent killer — lockfiles. A single package-lock.json diff can be 20K tokens on its own. |
Cost per turn · large diff in context | Filtered diff | $0.06 / turn |
| → Over a heavy week, that's roughly $300/year back. |
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Show Claude the change, not the whole repo.Scope the diff to what actually moved. Exclude generated files, ignore whitespace-only churn, and let Terse compress anything you paste in by hand. |
✗ BLOATS CONTEXT Full file dumps package-lock.json Whitespace-only lines Vendored / build output |
| ✓ LEAN DIFF Changed hunks only --ignore-all-space Skip lockfiles Source files only |
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Paste a giant diff into Terse — it strips the noise before it ever hits your token budget. |
Three things to do right now. |
1 | Gitignore the noise from diffs Add lockfiles and build output to a diff pathspec so Claude never sees them: git diff -- . ':(exclude)*-lock.json'. |
2 | Ignore whitespace churn Run diffs with --ignore-all-space. Reformatting commits stop eating thousands of tokens. |
3 | Run big pastes through Terse Dropping a long diff into the chat by hand? Terse compresses it first — watch the token count fall in real time. |
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macOS · Free forever tier · 1,500 optimizations/week |
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NEXT WEEK The politeness tax. "Please", "thank you", "could you possibly" — I measured exactly what good manners cost you per million tokens. The number surprised me. |
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Until then — stay terse. — James
Builder of Terse · terseai.org |
