This is interesting to me, because Claude has been a net-positive for me. I haven't faced token issues or declining quality. I generally work with Claude as an assistant -- I may have it do planning and have it "one shot" a thing, but it's usually a personal tool or a utility that I want it to write.

For actual code that goes out to production, I generally figure out how I would solve the problem myself (but will use Claude to bounce ideas and approaches -- or as a search engine) and then have Claude do the boring bits.

Recently I had to migrate a rules-engine into an FSM-based engine. I already had my plan and approach. I had Claude do the boring bits while I implemented the engine myself. I find that Claude does best when you give it small, focused, incremental tasks.