Comment by stockresearcher
8 days ago
We use GH Copilot at work and this week sat for a presentation by GH about optimizing token usage and maximizing ROI on tokens used. Anyone else get this presentation? They didn’t have time for questions because they had to run and give it to the next big enterprise on their list…
They basically said that everything is too expensive, you have to watch it like a hawk. It was as if they poured a bucket of cold water on the room. People were wondering how they could do anything faster with all these strategies. And then “sorry no questions. Bye!”
Interesting. We use Kiro here and looking at the public pricing subscriptions and it's benefit to my workflow, it is clearly a significant productivity increase per dollar spent. And we were told we have a signed a deal that is better than that public pricing. They recently just enabled overages on everyone's account so that people aren't throttled and they are shifting people up/down tiers as required behind the scenes to align with their actual usage.
However when the 'cost' to do something is relatively flat the cost/benefit analysis is going to depend on the value of the person being enabled. Someone making $60k a year using AI to gain a 20% output improvement may not be worth the cost but someone making $160k a year would.
Do you use Kiro specs? I have been loving using Kiro for the same reasons, and and just starting to use the spec feature.
Did you have any good tips for optimizing usage?
The ones I’ve stumbled upon seem to be: switch models based on task complexity, use tooling like ASTs and compression, disable unused MCPs, compact often, be verbose with input to give clear guidance…
I don't think compacting often is good for saving money. It generates more output tokens and then the input is no longer from cache, which is priced differently...typically very differently.
> They didn’t have time for questions because they had to run and give it to the next big enterprise on their list…
This is such bullshit. Surely they could have recorded the shared part of the presentation and then spend all their time answering the questions?
We did not have any presentation yet, but the first serious discussion about the cost of tokens has started on the documentation level. Looking forward to seeing these presentations!
Just hire people and pay then a fair wage and let everyone get richer together ffs
When did American capitalism become such a zero sum game
When the powers that be decided labor didn't matter and the only thing that mattered was capital.
One will never get rich on wages. The only way to get rich is through asset manipulation and rent-seeking.
If you're in a market where a competitor can cut their costs to produce the same quality product, end customers don't know (and if they knew, 95+% of them don't give a crap) how rich you've helped your employees get.
If someone else can make it more efficiently, there's a powerful force for you to also have to improve to match that efficiency.
"Why is the airline experience so much worse than 50 years ago?" "It's massively cheaper per seat-mile, and consumers in aggregate reveal that they prefer the cheapest price that online travel searches, so airlines deliver to that preference."
It's always been this way. America has just been able to coast on being the only remaining major economy after WW2, and exploited the rest of the world instead. That exploitation of the rest of the globe has been mostly optimized now, so those shareholder returns are now coming at the expense of the 90% of Americans who aren't sitting at the table.
I think this is quite reductive. America certainly benefited from being one of 2 major powers after ww2. But unlike the USSR it invested in the world heavily. It rebuilt Allied and Axies manufacturing, and do a lot to revitalize the world economy. They got rich in the process but its not like they did nothing. They invented the internet and cure a ton of diseases. Setup a global order of trade that generates real prosperity.
I guess while I agree that American shareholders do reap incredibly benefits coasting is not really something america does. America is more than just shareholders too. You dont grow the world economy by coasting and you dont make up 25% of the world nominal GDP while only making up ~1/25 its population by coasting its inconsistent with reality.
2 replies →
Can you think of a point in history when it wasn't.
Despite all of the problems that exist were still the best off.