I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens 4 days ago
Been through this exact loop building an LLM product. The counterintuitive lesson for me: most "token saving" ideas are cache killers — anything that makes the prompt prefix dynamic (rotating retrieval, appending context per turn) can cost more than the tokens it saves, because you lose the cached-prefix discount. Freezing the retrieval selection early in a conversation and paying a slightly larger fixed prefix beat every clever adaptive scheme I measured.