How I saved 91.4% on LLM token costs and completely bypassed Claude 5-hour rate limits

If you are running AI agents or terminal coding tools (like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor) on a standard $20/mo subscription tier , you know the absolute pain of the rolling 5-hour usage window. Because these models have zero short-term memory between prompts, they are forced to re-read your entire chat history and codebase files on every single turn . In software engineering workflows, input tokens consume roughly 80% to 90% of your 5-hour quota. A medium-to-large codebase can lock you out of a Pro account