the expensive part of vibe coding isn't the retries, it's the context you drag into each one

been vibe coding a lot lately. paste the error, get a fix, it breaks differently, paste again. feels free while you're in it. then i looked at what these sessions actually cost me in claude code and it wasnt. one debugging session was $424 and i shipped nothing. just kept feeding the model the latest error at midnight instead of stopping to read the code. I went digging through my session history to figure out what actually drives the cost of these loops. i assumed it was the number of retries (more rounds, more money). it isn't. So its how much context you drag into each round. every retry re-sends the whole conversation so far, so a loop hauling 40M tokens of files and dead-end attempts costs way more per round than one hauling 15M, even if the big one runs fewer times. the retry tax is really a context tax. That flips the fix. cutting the number of retries helps a little. cutting the size of each one helps way more: \- start a fresh session instead of extending a bloated one \- close files the model doesn't need, don't paste a whole log when 3 lines matter \- if it hasn't cracked it in \~3 honest tries, it's usually missing context, not attempts. read the code yourself Found all this by reading the transcripts claude code already keeps in \~/.claude. if you want to see your own retry-heavy / fat-context sessions: npx codeburn open source, runs locally, nothing uploaded. breaks down cost by session, retries, and context size so the expensive loops are easy to spot.