The latest articles on DEV Community by Apps by Mo (@appsbymo). https://dev.to/appsbymo https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4201203%2Faca484e7-37eb-44f4-a57a-d9f7d272299d.png https://dev.to/appsbymo en Apps by Mo Tue, 27 Oct 2026 07:20:19 +0000 https://dev.to/appsbymo/how-i-stopped-my-claude-code-plan-running-out-midweek-2cmc https://dev.to/appsbymo/how-i-stopped-my-claude-code-plan-running-out-midweek-2cmc <p>I make Mac apps on my own, about twenty of them now, and I build them with Claude Code. For months my plan ran out on Wednesday or Thursday. I assumed I was simply using it a lot. When I finally read Claude Code's own logs on my Mac, most of the spend went to three things I could change.</p> <h2> 1. Long sessions cost more than they look </h2> <p>Every reply in a conversation carries the whole conversation with it. In my logs, a reply late in a long session cost about 3.3 times a reply in a short one, for the same kind of work. A session that runs all afternoon gets more expensive with every message, even when the messages are small.</p> <p>The fix was boring: when a session grows long, the coder writes a short handover (what it did, what is left, what to watch out for) and a fresh session starts from that. The new session knows enough to carry on, and it pays for a few hundred words of context instead of the whole afternoon.</p> <h2> 2. Reviews were the most expensive thing I did </h2> <p>I ask for a review before I ship anything that touches saving, sync or payments. Having Claude read a whole diff and hunt for problems is costly. Now a second model, Codex on my ChatGPT plan, does the hunting read-only, and Claude only judges each finding: real, or a false alarm. Across 68 reviews that used about 71% fewer Claude tokens per review, and 120 of the 128 findings were real bugs.</p> <h2> 3. Starting from nothing every time </h2> <p>The third cost was hidden. Every new session spent its first minutes rediscovering how the app is built, which command builds it, and the trap I hit last week. Now each app has a short memory (how it is built, the exact commands, the traps), each session starts with a brief, and each one ends by writing a page about what it did and what slowed it down. The next session reads that first.</p> <h2> What it added up to </h2> <p>In the week I measured, the same work would have used about 478M tokens with Claude Code alone. It used 280M. That is 41% of the plan saved, read from Claude Code's own logs, and the plan now lasts the week.</p> <p>You can do all three by hand: keep sessions short and write your own handover notes, use a cheaper model for the first pass of a review, and keep a notes file per project that every session reads first. I got tired of doing it by hand, so I built a Mac app that does it for me, Atelier. Disclosure: it is mine. <a href="https://appsbymo.app/atelier/?ref=devto" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://appsbymo.app/atelier/?ref=devto</a></p> <p>If you would like a short email when I ship a new Mac app or a big update (twice a month at most, unsubscribe in one click), you can join here: <a href="https://appsbymo.app/?ref=devto#signup-h" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://appsbymo.app/?ref=devto#signup-h</a></p> <p>What eats your plan? I am curious whether others see the same long-session effect.</p> claudecode productivity ai macos