read me if you're a vibe coding "token waster"

the name of the game right now seems to be effective token usage

Howdy, ya'll

It seems like anywhere you turn there's a joke/meme/complaint about how these models seem to gobble up tokens like they're going out of style

Partially, it's true - even the new Opus 4.7 now requires more effort (tokens) in order to function properly

But on the other hand, a lot of us still have really poor practices with using these tools that cause major bloating of our context windows

I recorded a short ~20 minute video on some tips for not pwning yourself on token usage in the free group: https://www.skool.com/tech-snack/some-token-optimization-advice

If you have anything to add, let me know!

News Worthy

Opus 4.7 Release

So… Opus 4.7 is out, and it's receiving a lot of mixed opinions.

Here's what I've seen with my testing:

It seems to be a little bit of a regression in terms of actually following instructions.

Two concrete examples come to mind:

When using Obra Superpowers to orchestrate builds, it completely ignores the sub-agent driven executions

Translation → all work done in main thread, millions of tokens wasted because it ignores direct commands

Second example:

Ignores context of questions I literally just answered…

Claude: "should we defer feature X?"

Me: No, we need it

Claude: "okay, ignoring that for now!"

Moral of the story → they're gonna need to make some serious fixes to the harness soon before people start bouncing away

Cursor Acquired by SpaceX

I haven't really touched Cursor since Claude Code became a powerhouse… as someone that doesn't really fine-tune code line-by-line, I never really saw the utility of it.

But apparently Elon Musk does.

They acquired the right to buy Cursor this year for $60bn - WTF?

Shout out to the Cursor team, it was my first ever "daily driver" for vibe coding, I'm happy for them.

You can read about it here:

Read the post on X

Claude Design Mode

Potentially the most controversial, Anthropic released Design Mode for Claude, and I think it's pretty great.

Like most tools, if you simply ask it "build me a beautiful dashboard" or some other vague question… you'll probably get some vanilla stuff.

But I did a video on it recently with a custom-built skill that helps you take PRDs and build designs from there.

Check it out here if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ98eeC0oDg

Things Worth Checking Out

• Karpathy Skills: Someone gobbled up all of Andrej Karpathy's advice on how to use coding agents properly and compiled it into a Skill you can use in Claude: https://github.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills
• Claude Fork: I was late to the game on this one, but apparently you can fork conversations now inside of Claude Code. Just type in "/fork" and it will branch your conversation at its current place into a new session. Great when you want to experiment from a certain point without muddying your context window
• Build Your Own X: If you're a vibe-coder that wants to learn how to do stuff better, this open source library compiles a bunch of "build it yourself" versions of popular tools. Maybe you wanna learn how to make a Reddit bot, a CLI tool for your product, or build a browser-based video game. They've got guides for all of it: https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x
• NVIDIA giving away free API access to stuff: NVIDIA is currently offering actual free access to some top open-source models. Grab a key here and plug it in to whatever-you-wish-you-could-do-for-free: http://build.nvidia.com/models
• Compound Engineering Plugin: One Claude Code plugin that's quickly becoming my daily driver for building stuff is the Compound Engineering plugin from Every Inc. I did a video on this one last week, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMm_vRk7vfQ
• Stop Wasting Tokens: All those CLI commands that dump into your terminal actually cost a lot for the LLM to read. This library compresses the outputs, saving up to 80% of your token usage! Check it out: https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

That's it For This Week!

-Sean

P.S. - I'm getting ready to relaunch my paid community for vibe coding to focus more on going from:

MVP → Production Ready → Acquired Users

We're currently at 63 members, price will go up once it's out, so check it out if you're interested:

https://www.skool.com/tech-snack-pro/about