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Anthropic quietly nerfed Claude Code's 1-hour cache, and your token budget is paying the price - XDA

Claude Code users reported burning through usage quotas faster after Anthropic shortened the tool’s effective cache window, reducing how much prior context could be reused without re-paying input tokens.

Published 2026-04-20Source: XDA

Why it matters

Caching policy changes can swing the effective cost of agentic coding dramatically. If your workflow depends on long-running projects and repeated context reuse, a cache-window reduction can turn ‘steady’ spend into surprise overages overnight.

Tokenmaxxing read

Tokenmaxxing isn’t just verbosity—it’s cache economics. Track cache hit rates and billed input tokens, budget for cache misses, and design flows to avoid replaying long context (summaries, state files, retrieval, smaller diffs).

Source takeaway

The article points to Claude Code JSONL logs (`~/.claude/projects/`) with cache fields like `ephemeral_5m_input_tokens` vs `ephemeral_1h_input_tokens`, plus a mid-April Anthropic comment on a Claude Code GitHub issue about the shorter cache.

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