[jarodrh]

The article's own example makes the point I'm about to make:

> To give an example, just doing Typescript type fixes with this model across 50 files cost me $54 this afternoon.

That's all because it ran through the most expensive frontier model for a mechanical task that a cheaper model could easily handle.

What hardly gets mentioned is that most people don't actually measure what each task costs them on a granular level. A lot of the waste comes from running everything through one expensive model without considering breaking the big task into smaller tasks farmed out to cheaper models.

Whether the labs' economics hold is above my paygrade. It costs what it costs. What I can control is my own usage.

Like everyone else leaning in heavily on AI usage, my tokens started running out mid week...sometimes within a couple of days. I had to do something about it or double my spend. So I started tracking my cost per task type a few months ago and it completely changed my workflow. The lowest hanging fruit was the mechanical stuff. Moving that to the cheapest models was a game changer, and much faster to boot. Mid tier models take the workhorse tasks. The frontier heavy hitters are now only used for judgment calls like reviewing and planning. Spend dropped dramatically.

Freeing up all those tokens made me even more ambitious to explore parallel ways of working, to get even more out of what I was already paying for.