Please stop telling me how to save tokens
We got a spaceship, and the whole feed argues about fuel. Why exploring what your AI agents can do beats shaving pennies off your Claude bill.
We got a spaceship, and the whole feed argues about fuel.
My feed this month is one long argument about spending less. Token-saving hacks. Plugins that trim the context before the model even reads it. Threads titled “how I cut my API bill in half.”
It all goes viral, because “save money” always goes viral. And a lot of it quietly makes the work worse.
Think about the trade. You have a thing that can think, write, reason, design, and build, and you feed it less on purpose, so each request costs a fraction less. You get a weaker answer to save money you were barely spending.
It is the strangest bargain I have seen in years, and it is everywhere.
I know exactly why it is tempting, there is a real satisfaction in watching that number drop, in feeling like you outsmarted the system.
That feeling is the trap. The dropping number feels like winning, but it is the wrong game entirely. You are running a fuel-economy contest while the ship sits parked in the driveway.
My whole company runs on AI agents for about $7 a day.
That is not a rounding trick or a launch-week promo. It is the real number, day in and day out, for a business that ships content, answers customers, drafts proposals, and does a hundred smaller things while I sleep.
I saved fuel in every corner I could find. I found a lot of corners. So whatever I am about to say, it is not coming from someone who never looked at the bill. It is coming from the person who probably saved more than anyone posting the tricks.
We got a spaceship.
I mean that almost literally. Things I do in an afternoon now were not on the table a year ago at any price. And the whole machine costs me less than a coffee (at the airport), which is funny, because I do not even drink coffee.
Now picture the moment cars first showed up. A whole species had just climbed off horses. Here is a machine that changes distance, time, and what a single day can hold.
And almost all the talk is “how do we save fuel” and “why aren’t these things good enough yet.”
That is us, right now. Sitting on a revolution, checking the gauge.
While a lot of smart people are busy counting tokens, some are already out exploring around the galaxy.
I saw it up close in my alumni WhatsApp community - a group of workshop graduates, creative people who have been sleeping less lately and are building spaceships
One connected his agent to his Whoop. Someone built a setup that writes her 100 posts a day, and another taught a design agent the visual language of Netflix, so now it prints him his own posters at home.
People are building full websites without knowing a single line of code, while the rest of the internet argued about how to spend two cents less per request.
None of this means be careless. I still save, every day. There is a right way to do it, and it comes down to one line: cut waste, never cut into the work.
Three habits do almost all of it for me:
I right-size what each agent reads, so a one line fix does not load the entire project first.
I match the model to the job, a cheap one for scanning and formatting, the best one for anything that carries my voice or needs real judgment.
And I kill the duplicates, because the most expensive token is the one you spend twice.
Notice what none of those three actually do: none of them make the output worse. That is the whole line.
Every real save removes something the work never needed. Every bad trick removes something the model did need, and lets the quality drop quietly while you admire the smaller bill.
So save where it is smart. Just not at the cost of the output, and not at the cost of the trip. Do not let the fuel gauge fly the ship.
And do it soon.
We are in a narrow window. It will not stay this cheap and this open forever. Prices climb, access tightens, the frontier gets fenced.
So this week, hand your agent the one thing you filed under impossible. The client system you assumed was too complex. The problem you gave up on years ago. Point it there and see what comes back.
The person who spends this window building will be somewhere you cannot picture yet. The person who spends it trimming context to save two cents a request will still be right here, with a slightly smaller bill.
Lift your eyes off the dials for a second, there is a whole universe out there.
The door is wide open and it is basically free.
Nobody buys a spaceship to save fuel. They buy it to reach the stars.
🛠️ Build of the Week: Maya Dror Melamed
Maya spent her career as a fractional CMO. She did not write code. A year ago, shipping her own software product was not even on the list of things she thought she could do.
Now she has a GitHub account and publishes products on Vercel. She did not get there by trimming her token bill. She got there by building.
“Today I have a GitHub account. I publish products on Vercel, and build things that a year ago I couldn’t even dream of.”
That is the whole point.
The tools got cheap, the frontier got wide. She went and stood on it.
That’s it for this week.
If this was useful, forward it to someone (a real human) who keeps talking about their token bill.
See you next week ✌️
Tom
(the guy who would rather reach a star than save a token)
P.S. This newsletter was 92% made by my AI team. And me. I brought the conviction and the coffee I do not drink. They brought everything else.
P.P.S. Missed a back issue? I didn’t hire 40 people, I just wrote 40 text files.
P.P.P.S. I teach all of this live in the workshop. That is where the Whoop and the Netflix posters came from.
P.P.P.P.S. I read every reply. The real me.