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Ask HN: What works for cutting AI token costs?

5 points - last Tuesday at 7:04 AM


My LLM token bill is getting painful.

Besides switching to cheaper models, what have you personally used to reduce cost in real applications?

  • bohdanstefaniuk

    last Tuesday at 12:14 PM

    When I work with AI to build something I like to summarize every conversation into separate folder and basically keep a journal for AI. This is how it looks like:

    "journal" folder:

    - 2026-05-12 Add comments support for the cells.md

    - 2026-06-15 Rework onboarding screen.md

    Each document contains show description of the problem and explanation how did we solve it. Then If I need to go back in time and improve one of the features I can use one or multiple of those files as a reference so we don't need to "rescan" entire code base and re-analyze it. And the most important - I'm not loosing some decisions we made which from the code alone can be considered bugs but they are features actually

    • mhrmsn

      last Tuesday at 7:30 AM

      Haven't benchmarked it, but for agentic coding e.g. Claude Code I found this useful:

      https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

      • corpusiq_io

        last Tuesday at 7:40 AM

        [flagged]

        • byteoptimizer

          last Tuesday at 7:39 AM

          [flagged]

          • solooperator

            last Tuesday at 2:23 PM

            [flagged]