Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word status line

Claude Code wastes 15-20% of user tokens on a feature that generates a 3-5 word status line for background agents every 30 seconds, with no user-facing option to disable it. The issue was discovered through OpenTelemetry data showing agent_summary requests consuming more tokens than the main conversation itself. A workaround using a Bun preload script can disable this feature, though updates may reactivate it.