Topic
Practices and tools for controlling AI inference costs, covering token usage, caching, batching, request routing and capacity/pricing decisions.
One operator pulled 30 days of logs and found 71 errored, 24 expired and 17 truncated results sitting behind a batch status that read "ended" every time. Matching by position had already mis-filed reports.
Reality
Vinod Bijlani argues in Forbes that a token price measures only what an application consumed, while the idle accelerators and rising power draw behind it never reach the invoice a CIO reviews. He works for HPE.
Reality
A dev.to post credits a roughly 42x drop in token use on a code-editing workload to deleting an agent's reread loop. The gateway it recommends can only route whole calls, and the two levers are different sizes.
Reality
A dev.to tutorial documents the new schema: thinking is permanently on, depth comes from a five-step effort enum, and clients that computed a token budget have to be recalibrated by hand rather than translated.
Reality
A developer measured 111,713 tokens of JSON schema from 10 MCP servers, injected before the first message, and priced the year at $1,764 per seat. The per-server number is the useful one.
Reality
A dev.to writeup argues production agents degrade because nothing in their memory store marks a fact stale. The interesting part is where that puts the work: on the write path, not on retrieval.
Reality
Teams now maintain agent context files line by line because tokens are metered. The same teams left the human wiki to rot for a decade.
Reality
V4 Pro shipped with an API price increase of up to 12-fold, and Moonshot AI and ByteDance have added paid tiers. Anyone whose margins assumed cheap Chinese endpoints needs to re-model.
Reality