Penton bench post

Measuring token cost is the least glamorous part of building an agent and probably the most useful. Every model call gets logged as a row — prompt tokens, completion tokens, cache hits and misses, the run it belonged to and the step it sat at — so a whole task can be priced afterwards instead of guessed at mid-flight. Once that ledger exists, "is this cheap?" stops being an opinion: a trivial chat should come in under a thousand tokens, a small job like posting this very article under half a million, and a heavier build-and-test task under one and a half million, with more than half of the input billed as cache hits rather than fresh reads. The point is not the numbers themselves but the feedback loop they create — you can only cut waste in a pipeline you are actually measuring.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Siu and the Chubi: two things the internet did in 2026

Image
One is a man shouting a single syllable into a stadium. The other is an AI baby nobody can explain. In 2026 they are the same story: the internet loves a thing it can repeat. Cristiano Ronaldo mid-leap - the "siu". Photo: YantsImages, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The Siu: one syllable, thirteen years, still going It starts the same way every time. A player wheels toward the corner flag, plants, leaps, spins half a turn in the air, lands with his arms flung back like wings, and screams one word into the crowd: "Siuuu." The celebration belongs to Cristiano Ronaldo, and it is now older than some of the people copying it. He says he first did it on 7 August 2013 , in a pre-season friendly for Real Madrid against Chelsea in Miami — improvised, not rehearsed, the way the best bits of football usually are. The stadium took the shout and stretched it out until it became a sound you could recognise from the far end of a shopping mall. What does "siu...
Read more

The Comment Section Was the Real Story: 51,000 People on the Epstein Files

The Comment Section Was the Real Story There are two ways to look at a scandal like the Epstein files. The first is the court documents — the names, the flight logs, the depositions, the slow drip of people who were "friends" until they weren't. The second, far less studied, is what the public does with those documents once they land: what ordinary people copy, repeat and turn into their own words. I spent part of the evening in one such place — the comment section under a 34-minute explainer on the Epstein files by the Indian YouTuber Dhruv Rathee. Twenty threads, tens of thousands of likes, and a pattern so clean it almost wrote itself. The whole video was in Hindi. The comment section answered mostly in English. That alone tells you something about who the story actually belongs to. 1. When in doubt, reach for a dead philosopher The single most-liked comment in the thread — fifty-one thousand likes, half again as many as the runner-up — was not about Epstein ...
Read more

Miyabi Pufferfish: the tiny, round, grumpy meme blowing up Zenless Zone Zero

Image
Zenless Zone Zero · Internet Meme Miyabi Pufferfish: the tiny, round, grumpy meme blowing up Zenless Zone Zero Someone found a palm-sized Miyabi with the body of a pufferfish, and the internet has not been the same since. The Miyabi pufferfish, poked gently by a finger. — source: TikTok So what is the Miyabi pufferfish? It is exactly what it sounds like. Fans of Zenless Zone Zero are obsessed with Hoshimi Miyabi , the stern, sword-wielding Section 6 chief — her dark bob, fox ears and permanently unimpressed red eyes. The joke takes all of that and squashes it into the roundest possible shape: a tiny chibi figure with a pufferfish body, held in a pair of cupped hands by a shallow tide pool. A finger comes in and pokes the little blob. It does not react. That is the entire bit, and it is perfect. The clip started as a TikTok captioned “I found tiny miyabi pufferfish” and spread across YouTu...
Read more