Five low-friction habits that compound across every coding session, every project, every day.
Most Claude Code users blow through context budgets without realizing where it's going. Each tip below is a single habit. Apply all five and you'll get 3-5x more useful conversation on the same prompts.
1. Use .md, Not PDF or Screenshots
The pain:every PDF you upload burns about 3,000 tokens just to parse. Every screenshot burns about 1,200. That's context you'll never get back, and it stacks across every message.
The fix: open the PDF in Google Docs, then File → Download → Markdown. Drop the .md instead. For screenshots of code, paste the code as plain text.
The stat: 5 PDFs in one session is 15,000 tokens before message one. Same content as .md files is often under 5,000 combined.