The cheapest tokens you'll ever buy are the ones you already cached

Description and use

<p>Most agents throw a chunk of them away every single turn, and never see it happen.</p> <p>There are two levers on an AI coding bill. The big one is routing: send the easy work to a cheaper model, keep the frontier model for the hard slice, and measure whether the cheap one was actually good enough. That's where the large savings are, and you have to earn them.</p> <p>This is about the small lever. It's duller and it needs no judgement at all, which is rather the point. If you run an agent, you're almost certainly paying full price for tokens you'd already bought at a discount, over and over

Problem

<p>Most agents throw a chunk of them away every single turn, and never see it happen.</p> <p>There are two levers on an AI coding bill. The big one is routing: send the easy work to a cheaper model, keep the frontier model for the hard slice, and measure whether the cheap one was actually good enough. That's where the large savings are, and you have to earn them.</p> <p>This is about the small lever. It's duller and it needs no judgement at all, which is rather the point. If you run an agent, you're almost certainly paying full price for tokens you'd already bought at a discount, over and over

Outcome

<p>Most agents throw a chunk of them away every single turn, and never see it happen.</p> <p>There are two levers on an AI coding bill. The big one is routing: send the easy work to a cheaper model, keep the frontier model for the hard slice, and measure whether the cheap one was actually good enough. That's where the large savings are, and you have to earn them.</p> <p>This is about the small lever. It's duller and it needs no judgement at all, which is rather the point. If you run an agent, you're almost certainly paying full price for tokens you'd already bought at a discount, over and over

Evidence

The cheapest tokens you'll ever buy are the ones you already cached

Source