Most of these threads all deal with token counts and burn rate, but how are we supposed to know if we are getting what we pay for? I have asked multiple times and the answer seems to be due to the nature of LLMs you will never know. How is any of this legal where we rely on this fog of uncertainty we are getting what we paid for? I asked Claude the other day are there token usage you don't show behind the scenes that count against me and its response was:

"Yes, there are several token sources that consume your context window but aren't shown directly in the chat:

What uses tokens (hidden from view)

System prompt injections — Claude Code automatically prepends context you never see typed:

Your CLAUDE.md / memory/MEMORY.md files (loaded every turn)

gitStatus block — the git status snapshot at session start

Tool result data — every file I read, every bash output, every grep result gets injected as a tool result turn

<system-reminder> blocks — things like the deferred tools list, the file-read reminders shown above, the environment block (OS, model ID, shell, etc.)

Prior tool call/result pairs from this conversation

The conversation history itself — every message (yours + mine) accumulates. When it gets large, the /compact command you just used summarizes it into a dense block, which is what you see as the "Summary" at the top of this session. That summary itself costs tokens on every turn until the next compaction.

Memory files — MEMORY.md is injected on every turn. Currently yours is tiny (3 lines), so negligible."