Bolt uses like 400k tokens for every tiny change now

Yes, it's expected: Bolt sends your project files as context with each prompt, so token cost scales with project size, not with the size of your request.

Things that actually help:

• Get the big data out. Those product JSON files are probably the largest thing in context. Move them to the database (Supabase) or at least to public/ and exclude them.
• Exclude files from AI context. Bolt supports a .bolt/ignore file (gitignore syntax). Add data files, generated files, old unused components, lock files you don't need it to read:

  src/data/*.json
  public/**
  

  Careful: files it can't see, it can't edit either, and it may guess wrong about them.
• Batch small tweaks. Five cosmetic changes in one prompt cost about the same as one.
• Edit trivial things by hand in the code editor. Changing bg-blue-500 yourself costs 0 tokens.

At some size it's worth exporting to GitHub and continuing in Cursor/Claude Code, which only read the files they need.