Topic
Managing inference spend through per-token pricing awareness, model tiering and cost-per-outcome accounting.
A dev.to writeup puts prompt caching at 70 to 80 percent off. Its own worked example implies about 90 percent at a perfect hit rate, and the gap is your miss rate, which timestamps and f-strings at the top of a system prompt create.
Reality
More than 70% of pull requests at Uber are attributed to agents and weekly requests grew 9.4x in six months, yet spend has held flat since April. The lever behind that is routing, which makes this an organizational question rather than a procurement one.
Reality
Nvidia's CEO wants a $500,000 engineer burning $250,000 in tokens. That is half of payroll on one line item, and the companies that adopted the metric first are already writing caps.
Reality
Spring AI 2.0 moves schema enforcement to the provider, which trims input tokens on every healthy call. The retry path still bills the whole context again, in full.
Reality
A dev.to post scores ten coding models on five real tasks and divides by price. The method is cheap to copy; the vendor plumbing it recommends deserves more scrutiny than the arithmetic.
Reality