Not sure what tier you're on.

Basically; spin up in the morning eats a lot of tokens because the cache is cold. This has actually gotten worse now that Opus supports a 1Mt context.

So: compact before closing up for the night (reduces the size of the cache that needs to be spun up); and the default cache life is 5 minutes, so keep a heartbeat running when you step away from the keyboard to keep the cache warm.

Also, things like web-research eat context like crazy. Keep those separate, and ask for an md report with the key findings to feed into your main.

This is not exhaustive list and it's potentially subtly wrong sometimes. But it's a good band-aid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616297

Know what's funny? Openclaw might actually burn less tokens than a naive claude code user; if configured correctly. %-/