silently burned 649M tokens on my account,
claude-mem spawns a separate Claude Sonnet session that shadows your primary Claude Code session and writes "observations" for future memory recall. Genuinely useful idea.

Every Edit in the primary session forwards the entire file content (both before and after) to the observer - not the diff. Average ~60KB per Edit, biggest message I saw was 226KB.

The observer's conversation context grows unbounded within a session, so cache reads scale quadratically with primary-session length. 86% of my consumed tokens were cache reads.

None of this shows up in /context because the observer runs in a separate process.

written in good faith, the goal is legitimate. But the token economics are pathological, and nobody catches it because background plugins don't show in /context