Ask HN: What works for cutting AI token costs?

Posted by leoncos 17 hours ago

Counter5Comment2OpenOriginal

My LLM token bill is getting painful.

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

Comments

Comment by bohdanstefaniuk 12 hours ago

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

Comment by mhrmsn 16 hours ago

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

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

Comment by corpusiq_io 16 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by solooperator 9 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by byteoptimizer 16 hours ago

[flagged]