← 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.

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