Totally fair — for a one-off question the website is unbeatable: no infra, no bill to think about. The case I’m describing is narrower: agents running unattended in a pipeline — a review bot on every PR, a nightly batch, a CI step — where there’s no human in the loop to notice that a prompt tweak quietly 5x’d the tokens per run. Interactive chat, you feel the cost immediately; automated steps, you only see it on the invoice weeks later. If you’re not running agents in automation, you genuinely don’t have this problem. :)
Totally fair — for a one-off question the website is unbeatable: no infra, no bill to think about. The case I’m describing is narrower: agents running unattended in a pipeline — a review bot on every PR, a nightly batch, a CI step — where there’s no human in the loop to notice that a prompt tweak quietly 5x’d the tokens per run. Interactive chat, you feel the cost immediately; automated steps, you only see it on the invoice weeks later. If you’re not running agents in automation, you genuinely don’t have this problem. :)