This used to be really effective and cheap, now it lights my quota on fire, even after I fix the config and restore smaller subagents instead of like-agents

Multiple (slow) conversations seems to be the efficient path for me the past week or so

That is how the majority of developers use AI. Aim small miss small and all that. What's great about AI is that you can ask many many small questions about big data dumps (like logs and stack traces), for relatively little usage.