Cursor uses more tokens than usual?

Support Bug Reports
1

I just asked cursor to change some next in a jupyter notebook (the notebook is all markdown, part of creating a pdf worknook). It used 5.5 million tokens… I can review the session and try to figure out why - but anyone else notice this?

2

Hi there!

We detected that this may be a bug report, so we’ve moved your post to the Bug Reports category.

To help us investigate and fix this faster, could you edit your original post to include the details from the template below?

Bug Report Template - Click to expand

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

  • Editor, Tab & Chat (autocomplete, Composer, in-editor agent)
  • Terminal & commands
  • Models, pricing & API keys (availability, Auto/Max, BYOK/Bedrock)
  • MCP & tools
  • Cloud Agents & Automations (cursor.com/agents, scheduled/event)
  • BugBot & Code Review
  • Cursor CLI
  • Cursor Mobile
  • Remote (SSH / Dev Containers / WSL)
  • Account, billing & login
  • Something else…

Describe the Bug
A clear and concise description of what the bug is.

Steps to Reproduce
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  1. …
  2. …
  3. …

Expected Behavior
What is meant to happen here that isn’t working correctly?

Screenshots / Screen Recordings
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Operating System

  • Windows 10/11
  • MacOS
  • Linux

Version Information

  • For Cursor IDE: Menu → About Cursor → Copy
  • For Cursor CLI: Run agent about in your terminal
IDE:
Version: 2.xx.x
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: ......

CLI:
CLI Version 2026.01.17-d239e66

For AI issues: which model did you use?
Model name (e.g., Sonnet 4, Tab…)

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled
Request ID: f9a7046a-279b-47e5-ab48-6e8dc12daba1
For Background Agent issues, also post the ID: bc-…

Additional Information
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Does this stop you from using Cursor?

  • Yes - Cursor is unusable
  • Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor
  • No - Cursor works, but with this issue

The more details you provide, the easier it is for us to reproduce and fix the issue. Thanks!

6

Hi @will, thanks for flagging this.

A total like that usually isn’t the edit itself: on every step the agent re-sends the whole conversation so far (instructions, files it read, earlier tool results), and the token count adds that up each time, so around 50 steps with roughly 100k tokens of context comes to about 5M even for a one-line change. Most of those are cached re-reads, which are billed at a much lower rate than new input, and hovering a token count on your usage page shows the split between input, output, cache read and cache write.

For small text edits, it can help to name the exact file, cell and text to change so that the agent spends less time exploring the repo. There’s also a good chance the agent spent time (and tokens) testing the change to make sure it didn’t break. If you don’t want it to do that either, you need to tell the agent.

I suggest digging into the cloud agent transcript and seeing exactly where it spent time!