Your Prompt Has a Bill: Token Budgeting Without an Engineering Degree
Where the money actually goes, the five levers ranked by saving over effort, and a worked example that cut a real prompt to a fifth of its cost.
Where the money actually goes, the five levers ranked by saving over effort, and a worked example that cut a real prompt to a fifth of its cost.
Two to five. Below two there is nothing to generalise from, above five the gain flattens while the cost climbs. How to pick which ones, and where to put them.
Chain-of-thought earned its reputation on models that did not reason by default. On current models it often adds cost, length and invented detail instead of accuracy.
If it is true for every request, it goes in the system prompt. A decision table for twelve kinds of instruction, plus what it costs you to get it wrong.
Telling a model to be accurate does not work. Here are the four levers that do, plus a ten-point checklist to run before anything ships.
The button is the smallest piece of copy on your page and the one everything else was building toward. Five rules for writing one that gets clicked.
Every visitor arrives with a reason not to act, and it is almost always one of four. Here they are, and where on the page each one belongs.
A headline is not there to sell. It is there to earn the next line. Here are the four ingredients, five formulas, and the test that catches weak ones.
More traffic will not fix a page that gives nobody a reason to act. Here are the six things that quietly cost you conversions, and which one to fix first.
Trying a prompt once is a demo, not a test. Here is a five input, three run method that catches most failures in about ten minutes.