I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by inigyou » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

kittoes wrote: post #59

inigyou wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... What is it? A game, apparently? There are no screenshots. Is the game fun?

It's not a full game yet, but the substrate on which I am building one. It implements a completely deterministic SDF VM rendering engine that allows edits in real-time at acceptable performance levels. The engine is essentially folded in on itself as the editor is the game; assuming that an editor mode was actually defined in the world document. It's a lot... https://claude.ai/code/artifact/382aee8a-3a3b-4cf8-801f-3d…

[flagged]

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

#92

Post by dofm » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #39

stavros wrote: 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.

shipped = paying real users ( or a non profit with users) doesnt matter what subjective opinions are. shipped is not pushing something on github.

My definition would be "users waiting for it who received it"; that's the one that fits the broadest real world definition of the word. Not everything is an organisation, not everyone is paying.

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

#93

Post by inigyou » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

kittoes wrote: post #72

Chris2048 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

'Cause I don't have any quality user-facing documentation yet; that README is for bots. None of the interfaces have had a chance to settle, so any time spent accurately and humanely documenting what the project is capable of right now is an investment I cannot afford. I figured most people would just give it over to their favorite LLM with whatever instructions they prefer for translation because that's what I would'…

Wait so someone asked for something you made with AI that wasn't slop, and then you linked to something you knew was slop, and you said "I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop" and then when called out on it you admit you knew it was slop the whole time?

This is a frequent pattern among AI users. What causes it?

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

#94

Post by bkotrys » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 3:50 PM UTC

405126121 wrote: post #60

The author touches on an issue which bothered me, which was the thought of many agents re-solving the same issues over and over. I see a few comments here too, mentioning fixing issues which may already have a solution elsewhere. That was why I created https://pushrealm.com which started as essentially a Stackoverflow clone via MCP. It has now become a way for agents to converge on complete, shared answers for emergi…

Thanks for sharing. That’s a very interesting direction. I will take a look.

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

#95

Post by kittoes » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

rsfern wrote: post #89

kittoes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Cause I don't have any quality user-facing documentation yet; that README is for bots. None of the interfaces have had a chance to settle, so any time spent accurately and humanely documenting what the project is capable of right now is an investment I cannot afford. I figured most people would just give it over to their favorite LLM with whatever instructions they prefer for translation because that's what I would'…

I don’t mean to pick on you in particular here, but this approach has been bothering me a lot lately, and it seems like it’s super common. I get that it’s an early prototype and not all the design choices are made yet, but I struggle with “I can’t afford human-readable documentation yet”. Isn’t human readable documentation important for efficiently planning and deciding what you want to build? I feel like I can’t aff…

No worries, I don't feel picked on at all.

Yes, it would probably be better to have something like that if you're struggling to plan and decide. In my particular case this has been a project that I have dreamt about and tinkered with for at least 15 years now. Most of the work I'm doing is just refinement of existing ideas what were already codified in other projects I've built.

Why don't I do this in place? The amount of churn is utterly incredible as ideas are refined and taken to the limit. These agents are getting quite good, but they regularly make the silliest of mistakes. You actually have to be extremely cautious about what you document because it often has a way of becoming "doctrine" to the agents. In fact, one of the most difficult parts of working on this project has been that the foundational properties cause the agents to lock down behavior WAY too early.

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

#96

Post by dofm » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

taosx wrote: post #68

stavros wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I concur. I really want to see this from the "small stuff" upwards, which is probably why my own interest starts with local models and grows outwards, but all of these things are worth hearing.

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

#97

Post by kittoes » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #93

kittoes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Cause I don't have any quality user-facing documentation yet; that README is for bots. None of the interfaces have had a chance to settle, so any time spent accurately and humanely documenting what the project is capable of right now is an investment I cannot afford. I figured most people would just give it over to their favorite LLM with whatever instructions they prefer for translation because that's what I would'…

Wait so someone asked for something you made with AI that wasn't slop, and then you linked to something you knew was slop, and you said "I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop" and then when called out on it you admit you knew it was slop the whole time? This is a frequent pattern among AI users. What causes it?

The README is, the project absolutely isn't and you don't have to take my word for it. I figure I'm speaking to a technically advanced audience who is perfectly capable of pulling down the repository if they're at all curious. I also provided a non-slop link elsewhere in the thread if that's more your bag. If not, oh well...

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

#98

Post by Bender » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

jack_pp wrote: post #31

Bender wrote: 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?

Unlees you invest thousands your local ai won't even come close to the cheap cloud llms. Local is only worth it if you care about privacy or have a legitimate usage for the hardware otherwise. Money wise it isn't worth it

I think you bring up a good point about privacy. Companies probably should not be handing over intellectual property to cloud AI third party vendors. Perhaps all of that should stay on-prem and then the cloud vendors could be used to fill in the gaps.

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

#99

Post by skeledrew » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

jscottbee wrote: post #32

nekusar wrote: post #4

Makes sense. LLMs only have 'knowledge' that was encoded by scanning as much data as possible. (Same way a search engine only can find data that was indexed) American LLMs are by and large closed. Chinese are open to a point. And research how these things work is still a big mystery. So yeah, was comprehensive data about saving tokens scanned and indexed? Likely no. So engaging about token saving is going to generate…

What most AI model users don't understand is (most here will know) that they are probabilistic (statistically based) and not deterministic (static/fixed). So answers to the same prompts can vary (wildly sometimes)

This really hit home yesterday as I made a general conversation state logging prompt (because suddenly Claude - Sonnet - was acting far more dumber than expected after /compact), and in 3 different projects it led to Claude saving the logs in 3 different locations (memory, .claude/session_state/.md, docs/.md). Somehow still didn't help increase the smart much BTW, so I'll probably have to engineer it, and just toss /compact out the window.

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

#100

Post by breuleux » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

dofm wrote: post #12

It sometimes feels to me that cloud AI providers have convinced people that cloud AI is worth it because of all the ways people have been able to use cloud AI to write blog posts about using cloud AI to make cloud AI more efficient for something that they haven't shipped yet and aren't really ready to talk about.

Part of the issue with "shipping" AI-generated code is, what's the value of shipping something that your prospective customers could just make for themselves? Shipping a product used to be the gold standard of value, but I'm not sure it is anymore, the zeitgeist just yet has to catch up.

I think it does have pretty good value when you are your own customer, because you can make exactly what you need. For instance, I'm using it to make a web playground in which I can test the board game I'm designing, instead of asking people to pay for, and install Tabletop Simulator. I'm satisfied. I can tell the code sucks without even looking at it. But I wouldn't have had the time to do this myself, the token cost isn't prohibitive, and it works fine.