Code Review Graph consuming more tokens than without code review graph

[Sryborg]

Hi, I want to use this tool for across my projects.
To evaluate, I cloned the same repo in 2 different folders and installed code-review-graph in one repo and did not in the other.
I opened both the repos in 2 different cursor windows.

Send the EXACT same request in the one with crg and without crg. The one with crg is consuming 831k tokens and without it consumned 269k tokens. Had multiple similar observations with other repos as well.

I have installed and followed the same steps as mentioned in the README.
What might be going wrong?

[maxiao1204]

haha... so sad story..

[tirth8205]

Apologies for the long silence — a measured 3.1x regression deserved a fast answer, and this thread shaped real changes that just landed.

What can make CRG consume MORE tokens, verified:

1. The agent isn't actually routing through the graph. Some tools/modes never expose MCP tools (e.g. Zed's Ask mode), so you pay for the injected instructions plus normal file reads — worst of both. Check the session actually called get_minimal_context/query_graph.
2. Small/medium repos are a real overhead regime. Below a few hundred files, graph responses can cost more than just reading the files. This is now stated plainly in the README limitations and the new docs/FAQ.md ("When NOT to use this") instead of being buried.
3. Until v2.3.5 there was no per-call receipt, so a misconfigured setup could burn quietly. code-review-graph detect-changes --brief now prints a Token Savings panel per call, and --verify cross-checks it against a real tokenizer (tiktoken) — measure, don't trust.

If you're willing to share the repo's file count, CRG version, and which agent/mode you used, I'd genuinely like to reproduce the 831k vs 269k result — that's exactly what our eval suite should capture, and we just added a grep-baseline benchmark to make this comparison honest. Also worth confirming your build isn't indexing vendored code (node_modules/dist are excluded by default; .code-review-graphignore adds custom patterns).