CLAIM-2026-09-04-03

Sonar's worked example: a 5,770-token file read once unnecessarily on turn 42 of a 512-turn session is re-billed as a cache read on approximately 470 further turns — about 2.7 million tokens, about $0.54 at the ~$0.20/million cache-read price Sonar cites.

Why it matters

It puts a unit price on a single unnecessary read and shows the multiplier is the remaining turn count, not the file size. That is the mechanism a harness has to break.

Sources

• sonar2026smarter