Sources and leaks from Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian, Citi, and more show what is really happening with AI right now: companies are trying to rein in AI use as costs spiral out of control.
Something I’ve been noticing recently is that while the cost per token on specific models hasn’t gone up, the provided interfaces for using those models are starting to chew up significantly larger numbers of tokens for the same tasks that used fewer tokens with older versions of the interface software just a few months ago. Likely the interfaces are applying more expensive guardrail prompts and charging the end user for those tokens — but the end result is that it costs 4x as much to get the same work done.
My CLAUDE.md file bloated significantly. It tried to load unnecessary skills and would retain throughout the whole session. Fixing that, maintaining good wikis and using clear often really helped fixed my personal token burn.
Something I’ve been noticing recently is that while the cost per token on specific models hasn’t gone up, the provided interfaces for using those models are starting to chew up significantly larger numbers of tokens for the same tasks that used fewer tokens with older versions of the interface software just a few months ago. Likely the interfaces are applying more expensive guardrail prompts and charging the end user for those tokens — but the end result is that it costs 4x as much to get the same work done.
I switched to caveman on Claude Code. It cuts the token count; it’s the same output, and it appears to me to be faster as well.
My CLAUDE.md file bloated significantly. It tried to load unnecessary skills and would retain throughout the whole session. Fixing that, maintaining good wikis and using clear often really helped fixed my personal token burn.
The models are evolving. Everything uses multi modal in the bavkend, eating up more and more tokens for the same task.