Topic

Engineering

Practical engineering: instrumenting LLM usage, capturing tokens across providers, and optimizing model choice and context to cut cost without cutting quality.

• Model overkill — paying premium prices for commodity work — The most common AI cost leak isn't a bug. It's a premium model quietly answering questions a model a tenth of the price would handle just as well.
• Capturing token usage across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini — Every provider reports usage differently, and streaming hides it in a different place again. Here's why cost instrumentation is annoying — and where to do it once.