The afternoon I learned what my AI subscription was actually doing, and the 200 lines that took my next bill down 41 percent. 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. The Anthropic console refreshed while the Cursor request was in flight. I watched the token counter tick up live. The number it landed on for that single rename request was 8,400 input tokens. The actual prompt I had typed was eleven words. I sat there for a moment. Then I opened a fresh terminal and made the same call directly through the Anthropic API with my own minimal prompt. Same model. Same intent. Same outcome.…