Context is king. Invest in your repos documentation. When a LLM makes a mistake, don't manually fix, tell it how to fix it and get it to update the docs so it doesn't repeat the mistake. Sonnet 4.5 is a massive improvement. Accept that its going to be expensive. Assess the cost against your productivity improvement. Experiment and invest in your skills which will involve burning credits.

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Yep 100% context is everything. I keep a folder in each project called .context and symlink readmes and code examples and other documentation in there. I get aider to automatically load every file in that folder into context every request. Works a charm.
You can burn far less credits using something like openrouter to switch between models. Claude is great at reasoning about code, and Gemini is good at actually writing the code, and cheaper.