Claude Code's Background Agents Are Burning Tokens on Status Lines — One Dev Says 16% of His Spend

Claude Code reportedly re-sends each background agent's full chat history roughly every 30 seconds just to generate a three-word status update, and the overhead is showing up on bills.

A specific, costly inefficiency in agent orchestration is drawing attention from developers watching their token spend. According to @madhugogineni97, Claude Code re-sends each background agent's full chat history about every 30 seconds just to write a three-word status line — and one developer calculated that this polling accounted for 16% of his total spend.

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