A developer built a static Astro dashboard to track AI assistant token usage and costs across Discord threads, cron jobs, and projects. By parsing JSONL session logs with a Node.js script, they discovered two Discord threads accounted for 60% of total spend. The key insight: long-running Discord threads act as context traps, accumulating conversation history and inflating costs. The fix involves starting fresh threads per topic, using sub-agents for isolated tasks, and treating catch-all channels as lobbies rather than workspaces.