AI Tokens: How They Work, How to Count Them, and How to Stop Wasting Them
Tokens are the invisible unit that runs everything in AI, how models read your text, how they generate responses, and how much everything costs. If you have ever wondered why ChatGPT seems to forget things, why your Claude bill spiked, or why the same sentence costs different amounts in different models, the answer is always tokens. This guide explains all of it, from scratch, with no assumed knowledge.
Have You Ever Noticed This?
You start a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT. You share a lot of context, your project goals, your constraints, your preferences. The conversation goes really well.
Then, about 20 messages in, something strange happens. The AI seems to forget what you told it at the beginning. It gives you advice that contradicts something you established three pages up. You scroll back. The instructions are right there. So why does the AI not seem to see them?
Or...
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