💰 Ways to reduce your AI costs

AI is not free, as there are significant costs associated with training and hosting modern AI models. Some ideas on how to reduce costs with tools like Claude Code:

• If you do something that is somewhat repetitive, have AI generate scripts or programs that do the work instead of using AI directly. AI excels at creating automation tools.
• Capture context. Instead of relying solely on prompts, update documentation and have AI implement the doc changes. This approach captures a lot of context instead of losing context in prompts.
• Start with more complete and accurate descriptions of what needs to be done.
• Use cheaper models. In my experience, Claude Sonnet performs just as well as Claude Opus for most tasks I need to complete. Sonnet is 1/5 the cost and is generally faster.
• If the agent is spinning its wheels, stop it, provide more details, and resume.