Claude Code's Built-In Skill Burns Up to 355K Tokens on Simple Billing Questions

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A developer discovered that asking a single billing-related question in Claude Code consumed up to 355,000 tokens — roughly 40% of a 1,000,000-token context window. The spike was traced to the built-in claude-api skill, which automatically triggers whenever a Claude model name is mentioned in a query. Rather than fetching only relevant information, the skill injects its entire documentation payload as one large message, regardless of how simple the question is. The same question asked across two laptops produced different token counts — 265K versus 355K — due to a tokenizer difference between model versions. By contrast, similarly simple lookup questions unrelated to Claude models cost just 7,500 tokens combined, highlighting the issue as specific to this one skill's design.

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