I asked Cursor to rename a function. It sent 8,400 tokens. I checked.

The afternoon I learned what my AI subscription was actually doing, and the 200 lines that took my next bill down 41%. I had been using Cursor for six months when I noticed the discrepancy. I was renaming a function. A short one. Three lines of body. One call site. The kind of refactor that takes, at most, six seconds of human attention. I had two windows open. The Cursor chat panel where I had typed "rename getUser to fetchUser". And the Anthropic console in another tab, because I had been debugging a different project earlier and forgot to close it.