What I measured. What I learned. What it means for KV cache design. In 2026, engineering teams are waking up to LLM bills that rival their cloud infrastructure. A significant portion of that cost isn't going into new work — it's going into reprocessing the same context, turn after turn, conversation after conversation. I wanted to measure exactly how much. So I configured Claude Code to point to my own inference runtime, with Qwen2.5-32B as the backend, and opened a session.