i've still got about 9$USD left from that last free credit round, I am a poor example though. I think i keep a strange amount of discipline compared to most when it comes to usage. I see why it happens to people where stuff is just burned fast, and I've even caught myself a few times in moments where i wasn't monitoring properly and COULD have destroyed my usage and perhaps just got lucky that whatever i asked wasn't causing loops.

I also really dislike compacting though, and perhaps that is the catalyst for why i never burn unexpected amounts. In my Claude.md i have instructions to wrap up work around 150k tokens, from there i usually have enough of a window of tokens to decide what to do with the work done that session.

sometimes thats a simple ya, in those situations i use the remaining usage to have claude update .claude/ with relevant changes, if i've got more wiggle room for tokens, i might even craft up my next plan which is usually TDD style, and i have it write the failing tests before ending the session and passing the handoff.md which is the finished plan to a fresh context window.

This is probably not the best way for rapidly getting stuff done, but i think its one of the best ways to be effective with less usage at your disposal.