this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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Thus just in: handing your employees a bunch of nail guns with near zero effort put into training them on how to use the nail guns has resulted in terrible outcomes, to no one's surprise.
Its possible to use the tools efficiently at a low cost.
But the average dev Ive worked with has zero clue how to do this and has had zero training and will just rip through tokens willy nilly.
Yeah no. If my boss comes to tell me that from now on my "productivity" will be measured in token usage rather than actual "production", you can bet I will use agents for every fucking thing. Hell, I'll even make a desktop clock that works by asking the IA what time is it every milisecond and then updating the time on screen every time. I'm gonna burn tokens till you regret it.
If after this happens, the rules of billing change and my boss starts getting charged per token usage instead of a flat charge per month, that's not my problem; until my productivity stops being measured in token usage, you are gonna pay dumb money for your dumbness.
Did your boss actually say this, or are you just going off of some memes you saw and think thats something happening often.
Most companies care about getting work done in as few tokens as possible now, developers that can achieve the same results but with less tokens are extremely valuable.
Not only that, but less tokens also inherently means faster.
Any company that is blowing through tokens, without any effort put into training employees how to use the tools better, deserve to fail.
It's nothing to do with that. The costs are going up because the fees are going up. It's the natural progression of any startup. Give everything away for free but at some point the bean counters come calling and the marketing department doesn't cut it anymore.
No, I work in the industry and am vety actively entwined eith systems where we contract out to train and show companies how to use LLMs better.
And a lot of our clients now are of the "how do we use less tokens" variety, and you walk into the project and see the way they currently operate and go "oh god"
The average developers have absolutely zero clue wtf they are doing, they'll burn a million tokens on something that outta take 10k.
We often can get token usage down easily 90%+ in the first month just by on boarding and offering some basic training and helping install some basic guard rails, skills, etc.
Yeah I can see that you work in the industry...
Any tips on how to learn using the tools efficiently?
Start by learning all the critical things like Skills, MCP, Agents, etc.
Then look up skills and MCP tools that reduce token usage, improve recall, improve searching, improve parsing, etc
Then learn how to use sub agents bound to cheaper models for more expensive operations (the largest of which us always search and find ops)
Swapping to a cheaper model for a subagent with the job to just go find a specific thing alone can reduce costs like 30%, equipping it with tools that can search and find faster can push that to 70%