Comment by wiether
I tried to plug CC on my OpenRouter account, and just asking it what my project was doing (a directory containing three .sh of around 100 LOC each), I saw like 20 API requests to OpenRouter accounting for almost $1 in total.
Meanwhile copy/pasting those shells in OpenRouter's Chat and asking the same question resulted in a single API request costing a tenth of a cent.
I could probably try tuning everything to keep costs down, but idk if it's worth the efforts.
I don't actually think Claude Code is very good and this is exactly why. It's not really optimized to use its tools efficiently. I think Cursor probably does a better job of that but I imagine all of these coding assistants will come with some form of local tooling support in the way of vector DBs etc one day.