← AI FundamentalsLesson 2 of 4
Foundations · 14 min · Complete
Tokens, context, and cost
Context is rent. Every token you send is paid for twice: once in money, once in attention the model might spend on the wrong sentence.
Paste less. Point at evidence. If a policy, ticket, or eval trace matters, retrieve the paragraph — do not dump the archive.
Cost is a trust issue here. Hidden spend shows up as silent retries, bloated system prompts, and logs nobody reads until an incident.
Marked complete on this device.
Next lesson