Cursor Token Usage Too High?
Fix It in 30 Seconds

If you're seeing "rate limit exceeded", slow responses, or a shocking API bill from Cursor, the problem is simple: Cursor sends way too much context to the LLM on every request.

On a 50K+ line codebase, each Cursor request can send 80,000–200,000 tokens. That's $0.24–$0.60 per question at Claude Sonnet pricing.

Entroly compresses that context 70–95% — same accuracy, fraction of the tokens.

Without Entroly
162K tokens
per request (avg)
With Entroly
16K tokens
per request (90% reduction)

The Fix: 3 Steps

1
pip install entroly
2
cd /your/project && entroly go
3

Restart Cursor. Done. Entroly runs as an MCP server — Cursor uses it automatically.

Why Cursor Uses So Many Tokens

When you ask Cursor a question, it builds a context prompt from:

On medium-to-large codebases, this routinely exceeds 100K tokens. The LLM only needs a fraction of this to answer your question correctly.

What Entroly Does

Entroly uses information theory (Shannon entropy, 0/1 Knapsack optimization, BM25 ranking) to select the optimal subset of code that answers your specific question. It sends only what matters, keeping everything else available via Content-Compressed Retrieval handles that the AI can fetch if needed.

This approach is fundamentally different from truncation (which loses information) or embedding-based RAG (which requires GPU and misses structure). Entroly is lossless — every omitted fragment is recoverable.

Also Works With

FAQ

Why is Cursor using so many tokens?
Cursor sends your entire visible context to the LLM — open files, recent edits, terminal output, and @-mentioned files. On medium codebases, this is 80,000–200,000 tokens per request. Most of this context is irrelevant to your specific question.
Will this affect Cursor's answer quality?
It typically improves answer quality. LLMs suffer from attention degradation when context windows are stuffed with irrelevant code. By selecting only the relevant fragments, Entroly helps the model focus on what matters. Plus, WITNESS catches hallucinations.
Does this work with Cursor Pro subscription?
Yes. Even with subscription plans, fewer tokens per request means faster responses and fewer rate limit hits. For API mode (bring your own key), the cost savings are direct and measurable.
Is this safe? Does it send my code anywhere?
Entroly is 100% local. It runs on your machine, processes your code locally, and never sends anything to external servers. Apache-2.0 licensed, open-source, no telemetry by default.

📚 Related

→ How to Reduce Claude API Costs by 90% → How to Prevent AI Hallucinations in Code → Best Context Compression Tools (2026) → Cursor Context Optimization Guide

Fix It Now — 30 Seconds

pip install entroly && cd /your/repo && entroly go

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