They are now literally blaming users for using their product as advertised:

https://x.com/lydiahallie/status/2039800718371307603

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Digging into reports, most of the fastest burn came down to a few token-heavy patterns. Some tips:

• Sonnet 4.6 is the better default on Pro. Opus burns roughly twice as fast. Switch at session start.

• Lower the effort level or turn off extended thinking when you don't need deep reasoning. Switch at session start.

• Start fresh instead of resuming large sessions that have been idle ~1h

• Cap your context window, long sessions cost more CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=200000

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https://x.com/bcherny/status/2043163965648515234

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We defaulted to medium [reasoning] as a result of user feedback about Claude using too many tokens. When we made the change, we (1) included it in the changelog and (2) showed a dialog when you opened Claude Code so you could choose to opt out. Literally nothing sneaky about it — this was us addressing user feedback in an obvious and explicit way.

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Off topic, but I found Sonnet useless. It can't do the simplest tasks, like refactoring a method signature consistently across a project or following instructions accurately about what patterns/libraries should be used to solve a problem.