I shifted gears from using Claude (Sonnet 4.6) with Hermes on PC (via Telegram) to using Claude Code in Terminal on my MacBook Air. It did everything I was doing on my Hermes setup. I connected it to Vercel and I built an app, pushed it, and it went live.
I took up vibe coding when I first heard about Lovable over a year ago. And while I've dabbled a lot with Lovable (and other apps), I decided it was time for my next challenge. While I did try 'coding' with Gemini and following instructions to push into Vercel using terminal commands, and eventually discovered how to use Claude with Hermes, Claude Code was new territory I didn't explore yet, despite everyone raving about it (shoutouts to Jordan and Peter here).
There was one problem. When I vibe code, I vibe code. I go with the flow. And do what I feel. While I do have a concept going into my app builds, I start from what I have in mind, and just start prompting. Shifting from Lovable to using Claude's API (with Hermes) taught me how to quickly burn tokens… which isn't the most effective way to use these tools.
AI business models are shifting towards token usage versus subsidized cost (where a $100 monthly subscription could yield $20k+ in productivity), it has become all the more important to use tokens efficiently. Think of tokens as a measure of how you communicate back and forth with AI. The bigger your prompt, the greater the concept, and the more AI needs to do to figure out what you want it to do, the more tokens you consume.
My Claude became a token hog. Constantly hungry. Voraciously consuming. There were days where I'd spend $100+ USD in tokens. And just like my writing, my mind goes on a tangent, and I veer left and right, forward and back, with so many ideas happening all at once.
Not good if you want to use tokens efficiently.
So I took Claude Code 101, learned a few commands such as /compact and /compress (and switching to plan mode), and all of a sudden my token consumption dropped drastically. (Seriously – my credit balance has not gone down even a penny for a whole day… which is impossible and something else must be wrong.)
How hungry is your Claude?