Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

My Claude Code usage would have been $24k last month if I didn't have a max plan, at least according to Claude-Monitor.

I've been using a tool I developed (https://github.com/stravu/crystal) to run several sessions in parallel. Sometimes I will run the same prompt multiple times and pick the winner, or sometimes I'll be working on multiple features at once, reviewing and testing one while waiting on the others.

Basically, with the right tooling you can burn tokens incredibly fast while still receiving a ton of value from them.

Looked at your tool several times, but haven't answered this question for myself: does this tool fundamentally use the Anthropic API (not the normal MAX billing)? Presuming you built around the SDK -- haven't figured out if it is possible to use the SDK, but use the normal account billing (instead of hitting the API).

Love the idea by the way! We do need new IDE features which are centered around switching between Git worktrees and managing multiple active agents per worktree.

Edit: oh, do you invoke normal CC within your tool to avoid this issue and then post-process?

Claude code has an SDK, where you specify the path to the CC executable. So I believe thats how this works. Once you have set up claude code in your environment and authed with however you like, this will just use that executable in a new UI