To be clear, this is a lot of full-scale reading and (re)writing, without any rules, promots, "agents"/code to limit your resource usage, right?

Nobody's asking for $200 in single-line diffs in less than a day - right?

Right, this is having Claude Code just running as an agent doing a lot of stuff. Also tool use is a big context hog here.

It’s not about a single line diff but the same prompts with cursor does not end costing that much

Yes - do you understand why?

Yes I do, it’s just for new comers who are used to cursor where, without careful prompting you just lock yourself out of premium requests, that’s not immediately a given that CC is more dangerous and does not work the same way at all. Of course it requires careful planning but the trap is easy to fall into.

In my experience, it's more about the tool's local indexing and aggressive automatic upload and model usage limitations to avoid them (and you) overpaying.

People are recreating this with local toolchains now.