🚨 PSA: Claude Code Usage Spike & Investigation · AI Agents

🚨 PSA: Claude Code Usage Spike & Investigation

Heads up: Every member of our team has been hitting massive usage spikes in Claude Code today. In some cases, a full 5-hour limit was completely exhausted in just 15 minutes.

This is likely due to documented caching bugs where the system fails to reuse context and instead re-bills for the entire codebase on every turn.

We are still studying the issue, but the following steps have already helped us mitigate the drain:

Strict .claudecodeignore: Add everything non-essential (node_modules, dist, .git, logs). The smaller the context Claude "sees," the slower the drain.
Frequent /compact: Run this command every 10-15 minutes. It truncates session history and forces a fresh, smaller cache point.
Direct File Paths: Instead of asking Claude to "search" or "find" things, specify exact paths (e.g., /src/components/Button.tsx). This prevents the tool from burning tokens on repository exploration.
Restart for New Tasks: Exit and restart the CLI when switching focus to prevent "context bloat" from carrying over.

Technical context for those affected:

We are continuing to monitor the situation and will keep you posted as we find more ways to optimize usage. Stay tuned!

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