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I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

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Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#61
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.World... "Shipped" is a bit strong in my case, but I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop.

One sentence into that readme I can tell you that yes, it most definitely counts as slop.

That's fair critique, the README itself is indeed slop explicitly written by bots for bots. What it actually does and how it works is actually pretty neat if you care to look.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#62
post #7

Simply starting in the right part of the search space is the biggest predictor of success. The best way to save tokens is to start out the deep research pass with cheap models and then funnel the findings through increasingly powerful models. I've got a pipeline right now that uses all 3 of the gpt-5.6 model variants to address each stage of the process. If you are using models like sol or terra to generate hypotheti…

Couldn't someone build an adaptive system, where the llm is frequently judging the difficulty of a task and switching to a more/less powerful model?

The judgment of task difficulty is a cursed problem. In most domains you really don't know what is down there until you start digging a little bit.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#63
post #56
post #50

I did too, and made https://clawback.md -- trying to figure out how to market it now (ie, invented the tech before I found the user -- again).

I don't think you made that. It looks for sure like an LLM made it. And now that you have typed some words into a chat box to produce a thing, you are confused about why other people won't pay money to you for the output of the chatbox, instead of typing the same thing into their own chat boxes.

I don't think you wrote this comment. I think you typed it into a text box.

RTFA - it's about using tokens to research saving tokens.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#64
post #41
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I've answered this question, the reply was always "this is shit", so I don't bother now. Bad faith questions just shouldn't be answered.

If you characterise questions as bad faith so you don’t have to answer, sure. Since this is my thread, and since I am an exasperated freelancer who has made most of his post-dot-com career from writing exactly the kind of quite small, simple, unambitious, often internal things for smaller customers that nobody would confuse with anything cool, who is trying to understand how AI is going to make his life any better wh…

I've shipped small, simple, unambitious internal things for our company that saved people lots of time, and I've shipped them in minutes rather than the a day or two they used to take.

I've just shipped a migration from our old auth service to the new one in a week, a migration that we've put off for three years because it would take the team months to finish.

I've shipped small side-projects that I'm the primary (and usually only) user of, but they now take me two days rather than weeks of effort and learning (e.g. https://www.writelucid.cc, https://pine.town, https://stavrobot.stavros.io, https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula).

I've made changes in OSS apps that I just wouldn't have made otherwise (https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/pulls/skorokith...), and even some closed-source ones (https://www.stavros.io/posts/adding-a-feature-to-a-closed-so...).

I've shipped hardware projects that would have taken me months of learning in a few days (https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/).

How's that?

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#65
post #23

I am not a proper developer and only use AI for faster research of topics so please forgive my ignorance. Could one not save a lot of money on tokens by using the 80/20 or 90/10 rule in that 90% of AI usage is on local models and save that last 10% or less for the frontier models where the local model did not meet the needs? Did they cover this and I misunderstood?

To run a local AI that is half decent at research at usable speeds requires hardware that costs thousands of dollars. Spending thousands of dollars on hardware to save dollars per month on tokens does not make financial sense. If you run the numbers you'll probably find that using cheaper cloud models makes more financial sense than running those same models locally.

I suppose I was thinking in terms of companies that already had a slew of hardware and are just missing external GPU's, FPGA's or whatever people are using these days. A company might have a $50MM budget for tokens but could save a chunk of that using their existing hardware with some modifications.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#66
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In almost all cases right now, What sort of benchmark or test would convince you that "almost all" is more like "your weird set of cases" and nowhere near "almost all"?

Or "not even your cases but you got psychosed to think it does"

[deleted]

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#67
post #53
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud AI is 100% worth it. We've been able to do so much more with so much less.

Examples?

a massive number of data engineering agents. We are able to stand up, test, audit, deploy data pipelines much more efficiently with the foundational models.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#68
post #64
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you characterise questions as bad faith so you don’t have to answer, sure. Since this is my thread, and since I am an exasperated freelancer who has made most of his post-dot-com career from writing exactly the kind of quite small, simple, unambitious, often internal things for smaller customers that nobody would confuse with anything cool, who is trying to understand how AI is going to make his life any better wh…

I've shipped small, simple, unambitious internal things for our company that saved people lots of time, and I've shipped them in minutes rather than the a day or two they used to take. I've just shipped a migration from our old auth service to the new one in a week, a migration that we've put off for three years because it would take the team months to finish. I've shipped small side-projects that I'm the primary (an…

This is exactly why people shouold share what they are doing with ai, so we know whwn it works, the scope, tech...etc. Thank you for sharing.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#69
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One sentence into that readme I can tell you that yes, it most definitely counts as slop.

That's fair critique, the README itself is indeed slop explicitly written by bots for bots. What it actually does and how it works is actually pretty neat if you care to look.

Then.. why would you link to the readme if you know it's slop? What's the point of a slop README?

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#70
post #41
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I've answered this question, the reply was always "this is shit", so I don't bother now. Bad faith questions just shouldn't be answered.

If you characterise questions as bad faith so you don’t have to answer, sure. Since this is my thread, and since I am an exasperated freelancer who has made most of his post-dot-com career from writing exactly the kind of quite small, simple, unambitious, often internal things for smaller customers that nobody would confuse with anything cool, who is trying to understand how AI is going to make his life any better wh…

I don't use it to ship whole products. I have it do some tasks.

I have it code dsp techniques in journal articles I hand it. I have it create the unit tests, pipelines documentation. Then I manually verify the test cases aren't wrong and run the tests. If they pass it does what I wanted and I start looking at the code quality. It varies from being better than I could have done it to being objectively bad. I fix it if it needs fixing, then I'm done.

I have also pointed it at issues in our backlog and it usually finds the subtle logic errors underlying the behavior in the issue.

I haven't started and entire product from zero and shipped it. Mostly because I haven't started a new product since it was capable of that. But also because it has a scale beyond which I don't find it as useful. I have used it for an entire repo, but in the crates.io or npm scale of repo, not boost scale.

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